As Storm Babet brings challenging circumstances and significant negative impacts – including tragic loss of life – to the UK in mid-October, it’s an opportunity for teachers to do a bit of ‘live Geography’ and explore some impacts and approaches.
I thought it might help to bring together some helpful resources and ideas of what to do to bring the data and content alive in your classroom, beyond just collating images from the news!
Some superb examples of GIS and mapping in action – the interactive flood maps, are genuinely really valuable.
River webcams:
This incredible tweet from @MetWatchUK showed visibly how live webcam data for rivers is an amazing tool, and they linked to Farson Digital Watercams which collates a number of sites across the UK. If you’ve got one near you, they have archives and recorded images over a time period.
Met data:
As ever, earth.nullschool.net is my go to for mapping the causes – Babet showed some classic frontal features and swirls which are interesting to explore (quick user guide, including how to go back in time is here). The Met Office’s rainfall radar layers are slightly higher-resolution and based on radar of what fell (rather than cloud precipitable water or theoretical precip), but they are slightly less archivable and explorable after the fact. Good if you can capture and see what’s going on live.
There are lots of people involved in management and thinking – one of the best is Midlands-based Dave Throup – but I’d recommend exploring Environment Agency staff near you to see what’s being communicated and shared!
Hope you’re all safe, dry and your schools and students are exploring this from a theoretical standpoint only!
First, show mastery. Don’t leave implicit information; show that you know it, explain it, and understand it. You are explaining things to a professional Geographer, and someone who knows the subject in depth – so you don’t have to give a definition for key terminology that you use unless it’s important to your essay (e.g. “weather” versus “climate” as part of the exam question). This needs to be done with expert subject knowledge from the teacher – the security of vocabulary and technical knowledge is key.
Second, I think it’s worth identifying “what else could it be?”. Essay questions are often framed in the sense of “this statement” – do you agree? You should recognise this for what it is – an opportunity to compare this thing against others, and come up with a discussion, and answer. If asked to talk about an aspect (e.g. hazard mapping) put it in the context of all of the other ways it could be done (e.g. prediction, preparation etc.). You should be able to practice and understand the different “dimensions” of the answer: know how it could be argue that it’s A, B or C – and be able to “pivot” between your essay plan, depending on which of those three options they ask you to argue.
Third, it’s important to identify what could it depend on. Show the factors, accept and recognise complexity: it isn’t the case that there are universal “right answers”. Everything has a context. Often, it’s about development – HIC vs LIC and the relative impact of money on what can be done for management approaches and who chooses to spend the money. Sometimes the factors are physical – it might work one way for fluvial floods but very differently for pluvial; or for hard rock versus soft, or constructive versus destructive boundaries etc.
What can you say about it? Saying the “geography” of what happens will get you to the top of L2, and be a decent essay. To offer “evaluation” is how you get in to L3 & L4, towards the higher and more Geographical explanations.
What do we mean by “evaluation”?
Evaluation is a process by which you provide an opinion or judgement on the idea/fact presented. There is not – and, arguably, can never be – a “correct” evaluation. It will always be a matter of perspective and opinion.
To do it well, you need to have a clear idea of what you are doing to evaluate – and then to provide a clear and logical set of reasons why you’ve come to that conclusion.
Isn’t it just the conclusion?
At GCSE level, this can be the case. In your eight/nine markers, it was a “for/against/conclusion” layout, or a simple and predictable structure, but by A level, we need to make the evaluation a part of all of the essay. This means all of it: introduction, each paragraph, and the summative judgement of the conclusions!
How can we show evaluation?
Often, it’s important to understand that you can’t evaluate everything for all the potential aspects. The key is to pick the best/most relevant approaches to evaluation, and use them consistently through your essay. Learning which approach to use is a skill – it takes effort and practice. You must attempt it, because it will not come naturally by magic in an exam!
Each of these approaches are ways to frame and tell the story, and show that you understand what works and doesn’t, or why. They do not replace knowledge of facts, theories, processes, places and case studies – they have to go alongside that detail. It’s critical that you learn how to embed your evaluation at every stage – not just dump it in a conclusion!
Use Geographical Concepts as the framework
It’s sometimes helpful to think about some of the key Geographical concepts to ask your students to explore and experiment with. The GA Curriculum Framework has some good theoretical overviews of discussions, and the examples on pp7-9 of the report are helpful to discuss and consider from a curriculum perspective.
Here are some examples…
Evaluation Style
Why use it?
How to use
Examples
Positive vs Negative
Simple, effective (Perhaps a bit simplistic for more complex essays)
Create a paragraph structure listing positives of the question/topic, and another one listing the negatives May combine it with other approaches (e.g. positives/negatives for an economic factor, versus the positives/negatives for a social factor)
If you’re writing about something that was attempted, it’s clearly a good idea to look at whether it achieved what it set out to do!
“The Green Wall project was designed to… however, it failed to meet three of its’ five primary objectives” Use it as a checklist approach – how many of the objectives met, generates an overall scale of success
Most management, scheme based questions Works when you really know a case study example.
By category or theme
Complex topic, trying to break it down in to components
Social, Political, Economic, Environmental, Demographic Split up the impacts, statements, descriptions in to different categories, and then explore which ones work and don’t by category
Impacts of hazards, impacts of floods Complex topics/case studies
By scale or magnitude
Concepts that have a range of impacts – e.g. climate change, weather systems – can often work really well done on their scales
Shows a connection between micro/macro scale – and a ‘sense of place’ that works well for Geographers Even could apply to “scales” of variables – like aridity. In hyper arid zones… while in semi-arid, the reverse is true… etc. Globally… but at the local scale, this has much more significant impact
Physical processes/climate systems
By time scale
Understanding topics and concepts that have significant duration or events
Helps to identify the range of “when” this was done The present-day processes are dominated by wind… whereas in the pluvial periods (15kyrBP), the fluvial processes were dominant… Paragraphs are possible, depending on topic
Anything with a time component involved!
By impact or range of people
Recognising that Geography doesn’t impact people universally, and there are differences of human response
Often easiest approach is rich/poor “The most vulnerable populations in earthquakes are…” “This is not true in more developed countries, who have a more advanced warning system that has been systematically invested in over time…” “However, the impacts of the hurricane were worst felt by the poorest residents of New Orleans. Overwhelmingly working class and black/minority ethnic, these residents were unable to access the services that could have saved their lives…”
Case studies with a sharp economic divide
By perspective, theories
When there are clear narrative, structural, theoretical approaches that show contrast Can do it based on stakeholders too
“While a Malthusian approach would suggest that the population of The Gambia is doomed to failure, work using Boserup’s theories would suggest that this is not true” You need to know your theories/theorists. Works really well if you do! You need to be clear on how and why the approaches differ, and what that adds to your analysis. “Environmentalists loved the soft management scheme in Tewkesbury, but the more economically minded Severn Trent engineers disagreed. They preferred a hard engineering solution to the plant in Mythe”.
Any that involve conflict, people’s views, theories
By judgement, significance
Shows personal opinion and allows most freedom. Needs you to define (or fake!) that process
Ranking of paragraphs and restructure of whole essay: make the focus the most-least important not chronological. The most important factor here is… This is clearly more significant for the outcome, because… This is more effective in the short term, but loses importance in the longer term, because…
With incredible heatwaves, record-breaking high temperatures and lows of Antarctic sea ice, the potential failure of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and wildfires across Europe, this has been a summer where climate change has been on the global agenda – even if we haven’t forced it on to the UK radar through our own heatwaves.
There’s a few great resources and materials that have come out in the last few months, so I thought I’d pull some together for people to dip in to!
New Paper by Maslin, Lang & Harvey – Great Resource for Evaluation of Climate Change Solutions
Professor Mark Maslin is one of the UK’s leading climate science thinkers, and he’s released a co-authored new paper that is open access (https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444/ucloe.000059) focusing on the history of the success and failutres of the international climate change negotiations like COP. With a new one on the horizon in November, this is a timely look at what’s working and what isn’t.
Good for:
Outstanding resource for subject knowledge development for teachers of all levels thinking about climate change teaching.
Gives great history and context for what’s happened and where the negotiations have been in the past. Fascinating insight for the non-specialist (who wasn’t in the room… that level of non-specialist…!)
Works really well alongside the UNFCCC’s own interactive timeline (https://unfccc.int/timeline/), which you could potentially use as a resource for younger Key Stages or as an access scaffold for the first thinking on this topic.
Really good reflections on roles of NGOs and corporations – really strong evaluation points to be drawn out for and by students.
Need to think about:
Would be a good resource for a strong A Level group, but I think it’d need to be really thoughtfully scaffolded for most A Level students.
Some GCSE/KS3 students could access parts of this if it was presented in a smaller format – and could form part of a scheme of lessons tackling component parts of this.
Met Office releases new climate data hub:
The Met Office has always had superb resources for climate data, and regional and monthly climate summaries, but they have been mostly statistical and graphical in their original formats.
Now, though, they’ve used ArcGIS to bring those to life in a GIS-interactive and suitable form. You can access the hub here: https://climate-themetoffice.hub.arcgis.com/ with guidance, and demos for those who want to incorporate some of this work in to teaching.
Good for:
Incredible detail and backed by Met Office quality assurance
Really explorable and interactive maps
Need to think about:
Computer access/teaching from the front – as per most GIS applications
Where it fits best in curriculum work.
UCL-IOE Centre for Climate Change Education releases report and training for teachers
From there, the CCSE have produced a programme of professional development support for teachers, aimed to bridge some of the identified gaps and help people build their confidence.
Good for:
Outstanding resource for subject knowledge development for teachers of all levels thinking about climate change teaching.
Great resource for Departments, mentors, ITE/ECT providers to upskill teachers on climate change education – not just in Geography!
Really interesting analysis of
Need to think about:
Integrating thoughtfully in to a CPD curriculum, and sharing and supporting teachers with the contents.
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