#668: GA's response to the consultation on proposed subject content

Thanks to Steve Brace for sharing a link to a post on the GA's website which shares the main themes of their response to the current consultation of the proposed subject content, which closes on the 4th of September.

#492: Climate Change in the Curriculum

The Geographical Association has worked with the Council for Subject Associations, UCL’s Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability Education, and other partners, to develop the following statement that highlights geography’s distinctive contribution to climate change and sustainability education in the publication, 

The key contributions of subjects to climate change and nature education: a curriculum policy proposal.

‘Geography is a curriculum heartland for climate education, sustainability and green skills from Early Years to A level. Its distinctive approach focuses on the interactions and interdependencies between people and their environment and develops the skills young people will need in order to understand, adapt to and mitigate against a changing climate. Geographical fieldwork also provides them with first-hand experiences of nature and landscapes. In this way, geography enables young people to better understand how and why our climate is changing, how this will impact and transform our economy, society and environment – locally, nationally and globally – and what can be done about it.’

Download the statement from UCL.

Reference

Kitson, A., Phillips, M. & Dillon, J. (2025). The key contributions of subjects to climate change and nature education: a curriculum policy proposal. 

Available from September 2025 at www.climateeducation.org.uk

What part will the GCSE Natural History potentially play in this area of the curriculum? One would hope it would have sustainability and climate change at its heart.

#364: Sycamore Gap: a GA resource

A new(ish) resource which can be accessed and used by members of the Geographical Association. I am considering adding a section of this to my teaching this year.

Sycamore Gap is a significant landmark in Northumberland where three distinct features combined: a natural and dramatic dip in the physical landscape about halfway along the 80-mile run of Hadrian’s Wall, itself an ancient monument and reminder of the power of the Roman Empire, and until recently, a lone, 300-year-old Sycamore tree. The site has UNESCO designation and is a Scheduled Ancient Monument. Arguably, it will still be known as Sycamore Gap because of its story.

The tree has stood for hundreds of years, perfectly framed by the landscape, thrilling locals and visitors alike until it was deliberately cut down, under cover of darkness, sometime between the evening of 27 September 2023 and the following morning. 

The loss of the tree has caused an outcry and reaction of public grief.

These materials are designed to help children think about some of the issues this story raises. What do they know about Sycamore Gap? Where is it? Have they been there? Why and how do certain landmarks hold such meaning? What is the cultural impact of this and other significant landmarks on our lives? Whose place is this? Who decides what happens here?

While these materials provide a relevant and current context for developing geographical substantive, disciplinary and procedural knowledge, they also model how you might investigate other landmarks with particular significance to your own local community and landscape and the emotions they engender in people.

Complete Materials:PowerPoint
Teachers Notes
Photo Activity
Individual Resource Pages:

Sycamore Gap 1: What’s the geography story?
Sycamore Gap 2: What can images and maps tell us about landmarks?
Sycamore Gap 3: Why can we see so many stars?
Sycamore Gap 4: Changing views
Sycamore Gap 5: How do we feel about it?
Sycamore Gap 6: A Gap in the landscape
Sycamore Gap 7: Why should we value trees?
Sycamore Gap 8: What would be your ‘tree of the year’?
Sycamore Gap 9: Change
Sycamore Gap 10: How do we fill the Gap?


Thanks to Steve Rawlinson, Tessa Willy, Sharon Witt and Margaret Mackintosh for feedback, edits and ideas.

#285: Patrick Geddes and nature connectedness

Another person who will perhaps be introduced to students of the GCSE Natural History specification is Patrick Geddes, or at the very least some of his work may influence some of the contents of the final specification after consultation. 

Here's a slide from a presentation I was present at, at the Linnean Society. It described his influence on others and has a nice quote of his as well.

According to this piece in the GA journal 'The Geographical Teacher' (1921), Patrick Geddes was a GA Vice President.

“Editorial.” The Geographical Teacher, vol. 11, no. 2, 1921, pp. 3–5. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40555898. Accessed 11 Apr. 2021.

I have previously written about Patrick Geddes and his influence on the early work of the GA, and his ideas on nature connectedness. 

This is likely to be an important theme of the GCSE Natural History I understand from the early stages of its development. The disconnection of young people from nature was one of the drivers for the new specification project.

Many people will not be familiar with the work of Geddes. This page provides a useful summary of some of his thinking and writing.

He had some influential views on the environment and humanity's place within it.

Geddes was also involved in the Le Play Society, which was also an early part of the GA's engagement with teachers and networking.

An online archive is now available.

Sir Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) was a pioneer of the environmental movement. Credited as the father of town-planning, he used biological concepts to develop a holistic view of people and where they live, seeing both as organic and how the balance and imbalance between them affected health and well-being.

#256: Fieldwork resources - every Friday

Chloë Searl is an independent field studies tutor on the Isle of Wight. She also works as a CPD consultant, examiner and award-winning resources writer. 

She is also the current Chair of the Fieldwork and Outdoor Learning Special Interest Group of the Geographical Association. 

You can follow their Twitter feed on the link below.
@GAFOLSIG

Each Friday she shares a resource linked to fieldwork, and several of these have the potential to be put to use to those teaching the GCSE Natural History. This week's resource is a useful sheet that can be used to assess the human impact on ecosystems and habitats in an area.

This is sheet #93, so it's probably worth checking back through the feed for previous resources, or check the website.

🌍🔍#FridayFieldwork

Every Friday I showcase a resource which might make planning and delivering geography fieldwork a little easier. This week...

Human Impact Survey (Ecosystems and Habitats)https://t.co/SybBwsW1SJ pic.twitter.com/hCoGoka5Wv

— The Island Geographer (@theislandgeogr) March 8, 2024

#180: Cynefin

The Geographical Association has produced a very useful resource for those who may want to explore the concept of Cynefin.

It's one of the resources created by the GA's Welsh Special Interest Group.

The idea of cynefin connects with themes of home, or 'habitat'.

Natural History in its various forms is likely to explore different habitats.

How much is the natural landscape around where we live a part of this cynefin? If something in it changes dramatically, our sense of 'home' is likely to be affected.

#178: Natural History Podcasts #6: GeogPod

GeogPod is the Geographical Association's Podcast, hosted by John Lyon - my former colleague at the Geographical Association.

He has been presenting this for eleven full seasons. 

The most recent episode, at the time of posting, is the seventieth episode.

In that time, John has spoken to a whole range of people, including me in episode #53. 

Several of these episodes have a connection with some of the likely themes within the new draft specification.

There is also a focus on curriculum in many of them, and how decisions about what and how to teach are made - relevant to the decisions that will need to be made about curriculum time, timetabling, sequencing lessons and how synopticity can be built in to the overall 'narrative' of the new subject. Some interesting decisions still need to be made.

The twelfth season has just started, and starts with an excellent episode on Chalk Streams.... more on that in the next post.

#103: National GetOutside Day

 The best way to see some natural history is to Get Outside!

 

I hope you have something planned for today!

Between 2018 and 2020 I worked as a GetOutside Champion for the Ordnance Survey: part of a team of people in various locations around the country encouraging people to get outside in different ways. Some of them were athletes, bloggers, Instagrammers, runners, paralympians and TV personalities. I was just a geography teacher using my blogging and role to encourage fieldwork and other outdoor activities in the curriculum. 

We added a Fieldwork Week to my GA Presidential year, with thanks to Paula Richardson for her efforts there, and expanded it to a Fieldwork Fortnight last year.

There is plenty of advice on the Ordnance Survey's page for this day when people are encouraged to spend time outdoors.

And don't forget to follow the Countryside Code.

#92: Dudley Stamp's Land Utilisation Survey of the 1930s

This is a cross posting from my GA Presidents blog, which includes a biography of all the GA Presidents. This post is a description of the Land Utilisation Survey of the 1930s, an exercise which was repeated by the GA twice in later decades, involving young people to survey the UK.

The idea of how the land is used, and how that has changed will be important for local field studies, and the idea of citizen science is one that was partially 'created' by this project by the GA President for 1950: Sir Laurence Dudley Stamp.

A website section on the LSE website which appeared in June 2023.

It's written by Anna Towlson to go with an exhibition of mapping earlier in the year (which I missed completely). She works at the LSE.

A reminder that Dudley Stamp was GA President in 1950, well after he started work on the survey. He was also a million selling textbook author.

It outlines the background to the survey:

Sir Dudley Stamp’s aim was to undertake a detailed field-by-field survey of England, Wales and Scotland to find out exactly what the surface of the land was being used for. The idea grew out of his work as Chairman of the Regional Studies Committee of the Geographical Association in the late 1920s. British agriculture had been facing a long and severe depression, mainly because of the increase in world food supplies and competition from cheaper producers. Many towns and cities had been growing at a steady rate since the industrial revolution, with low profits and low wages in the countryside speeding the drift of labour from the land.

Stamp envisaged the Survey as acting as, in his phrase, a “modern Domesday Book”. This comparison caused some confusion at the time, in that it led some people to think that the Survey was part of a large tax-gathering exercise. But in many ways it is very apt: it was a comprehensive national survey that was designed to be of contemporary use as an administrative tool, but it also formed a permanent record of the country’s landscape at a particular time, something that is now of enormous historical value.

Stamp envisaged that much of the field work would be done by volunteers, mainly children from local schools and colleges. He also saw the project as a national educational exercise, an opportunity to interest young people in their local environment, to develop their observational and map reading skills, and to give them what Stamp called “a training in citizenship”, with each region playing its part in a nationwide scheme.

Few people had the profile and the force of will of Stamp to pull off such an ambitious project.

In autumn 1930 he contacted the directors of education in counties across the whole of Britain to explain the project and ask them to coordinate work in their areas. He then spent the next year touring the country to talk to head teachers and education committees and taking out parties to demonstrate field work methods. He estimated that in this first year he covered almost 2,000 miles a month, with his wife acting as chauffeur. By mid-1931, the Survey was underway in most counties in England, and by early 1932 in Wales and Scotland also.

Consider these statistics:

Stamp estimated that there were about 20,000 sheets to cover, with each sheet taking two to three days to complete. Field surveying started in October 1930, but most of the work was done between 1931 and 1934. During this period Stamp continued to tour the country extensively, meeting with local officials and offering encouragement to field workers. The Survey also issued regular bulletins to the volunteers to keep them informed on the progress of the project as a whole and to clarify questions or problems with the surveying.

By January 1932 some 400 sheets had been returned, and by January 1934 this had risen to over 15,000. The bulk of the fieldwork was finished by the end of 1935, with a flying squad of surveyors, mainly geography students or former geography students from London University, finishing off remoter areas that local volunteers could not cover. This stage of the project was clearly an enormous undertaking and by the end Stamp estimated that it had involved about a quarter of a million school children, as well as teachers and other adults.

Source of text: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsehistory/2023/06/09/a-modern-domesday-book/

One of the key people in the survey, and much forgotten is Eunice Wilson.

She is pictured in the blog post.

Eunice Biki Wilson, 1984. IMAGELIBRARY/755. LSE.

She started at the LSE as a cartographic assistant on the LUS. It was an interesting post that soon absorbed her talent and imagination and she rapidly developed skills that made her a pioneer of cartographic illustration. As new applications were found for the LUS in the field of land use planning, and as its work intensified, Biki eventually found herself as Chief Cartographer in charge of a new drawing office attached to the Land Use Division of Ministry of Agriculture

The survey results proved their value during and after the Second World War.

NLS has maps of Scotland and elsewhere.

The very last area to be surveyed was part of the Isle of Arran in September 1941, although all other areas were recorded by 1939. The surveys were extensively cross-checked by the team, even including Stamp with his wife as chauffeur: ‘I must have covered thousands of miles myself, often standing up on the front seat of my car with my head through the sunshine roof and a roll of six-inch maps in front of me’ (Stamp, 1948). The maps were also cross-checked with adjacent sheets when reduced to the one-inch scale.

Here's the map that features my village in Norfolk

https://maps.nls.uk/view/241043320

Key: http://geo.nls.uk/mapdata2/land_uti/key/openlayers.html

Stamp L.D. (1931). 'The Land Utilization Survey of Britain'. The Geographical Journal, 78, 40-47.

Stamp L.D. (1948, with later editions in 1950 and 1962). The Land of Britain: its use and misuse (Longman, London).

#22: OCR Survey - what are your thoughts?

On the GA Facebook page earlier today. A request for some thoughts. Please give your views as it will help shape the final specification and the support.

As it says on the survey's start page:
We have been working hard to prepare for the launch of our new GCSE in Natural History.

We would like to ask you some questions about the support that you would like to see in place ahead of teaching GCSE Natural History. We will be showing you a number of different resources designed to support teachers in delivering this qualification at different stages. We would like you to think about how useful each of these resources is in supporting the delivery of this qualification.

This survey will take you around 10 minutes of your time and you feedback is really appreciated. Your feedback will help to provide the right support package for teachers.

Go to the Survey directly here.

If you choose to complete the survey you will also get some clues as to some of the proposed support package and the thinking around who will teach this.

The support package questionnaire makes several mentions of different support for geography teachers and biology teachers suggesting that they think this may be a qualification taught jointly between those two departments.