As a postgrad student who has recently completed a Geography MSc thesis which examines critical pedagogy and innovative, student-centred ways of teaching school geography (including the pilot GCSE), and who has also just started a PhD entitled ‘A mad and interesting subject’: engaging students as citizens and consumers in new school geographies, I have read with increasing excitement the recent debates which have panned out on the crit geog forum.
I for one am interested in the new developments in school geography and how they are drawing academic geography into the classroom (for example, Peter Jackson, Louise Crewe and Doreen Massey’s work has been drawn on in creating the pilot GCSE modules). However I would argue that there is not simply a desire to change the content of school-level geography, but also the manner in which it is taught (in parrallel with academic debates on critical pedagogy).
Teachers, just like their academic counterparts, are under extreme pressure to achieve results and reach targets, and themselves have little time to think up creative, critically informed teaching materials and/or strategies. However this is not to say that interesting things aren’t happening in school geography and that teachers aren’t engaging in innovative ways of teaching and learning. The pilot GCSE is only being piloted by fifty schools and there are many other ways that teachers develop creative, non-didactic approaches to teaching and learning. For example I found that Teacher Networks, such as TIDE (Teachers in Development Education, see www.tidec.org <http://www.tidec.org/> ) seem to provide one forum whereby teachers and/or teachers and academics can come together to ensure that continuous curriculum change occurs.
For anyone (and I am pleased to discover that there are other people who have an interest in this issue) who are interested in reading more about these debates, a brief description of my interests can be found on my web page (http://www.gees.bham.ac.uk/people/phd.asp?offset=20&ID=479) as well as an online version of my MSC thesis, where there are plenty of references to start from! An extended version of this thesis will shortly be added to this page.
I thought it might be useful to provide some links to key sites about the pilot GCSE:
The Pilot GCSE specification is available from the RGS-IBG web site at: http://www.rgs.org/templ.php?page=4edsepol10
The Geographical Association’s resources for the pilot GCSE are extensive. A good starting point is:
http://www.geography.org.uk/projects/gcse_index.asp
Under the resources a direct link is made to Exchange Values (one of the examples I studied in my MSc thesis) http://www.geography.org.uk/projects/gcse_5c.asp
The Geographical Association’s ‘GeoVisions Working Group’ was originally commissioned to prepare a report which would inform the development of the pilot GCSE: http://www.geography.org.uk/projects/geovisions_pilot.asp
Helen Griffiths
Human Geography Postgraduate,
School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences,
The University of Birmingham
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