GA Presidency Month 2: October 2021

This is the second month of my updates on what I have been up to as GA President, to show what is involved (as much as possible) and also let others who may want to apply know that it is possible to take on the role alongside other responsibilities. It also comes just a week before the deadline to put your name forward to be President for 2023-4.

As always, there were many daily emails on a whole range of topics, many of which can't be shared here.

The month started with a few events for the Geographical Association which involve the President specifically.

Governance Working Group is a small sub-group which supports the Governing Body. This includes the Honorary Treasurer and others, and follows other meetings between other senior members of the Association to consider strategy. This meets termly, with other ad hoc meetings happening in between.

The Early Career Teacher's eConference had a good range of delegates. I chaired the event, and also spoke. I enjoyed all our varied speakers who brought their own styles, messages and energy to the event. This took place on a Saturday and we had a good range of sessions. I hosted and led the day as I did for the previous SCSIG session on COP26 a few weeks ago. The event was well attended.

Sessions included:

• My own session on belonging to a subject community
• Gemma Collins from the University of Birmingham on 'How to build a geographer' - a lovely session
• Katy Salter on the creation of resources - very useful advice here
• Tanith Ludlam on making the most of ECT experiences - a member of the GA's SPC

GA Branches are starting to come back to life again and plan their programmes and I'm pleased to have been invited to speak at several of them. The GA Cambridge Branch has the support of a couple of former GA Presidents: Keith Grimwade and Chris Kington, and I have spoken at their events a number of times. They had their AGM which I attended. I also responded to invitations to speak. 

If any GA Branch officer needs further support, or would like to invite me to come along and speak at their branch, please get in touch.

There was also a meeting of the Geographers' Gaze project team, uncovering some of the GA's Lantern Slides and writing accompanying materials.

ERASMUS+ is something which has been lost (hopefully not for good) for UK schools and universities as a result of the poor decisions made during the Brexit process.

I am involved in two final projects currently on behalf of school and this month also saw our first face to face meeting of the partners for the GI Pedagogy project. We hosted the partners at King's Ely. We weren't able to have the usual social events that we would have normally done and the meeting was a little truncated too compared to previous mobilities. The project is about applying Rosenshine's principles to teaching with GIS, and developing a model for this, which is just about complete.

If you would like to be involved in trialling our GIS resources and teacher training course then please get in touch with me.

Our European visitors were able to enjoy a Sunday roast in their hotel, attend evensong in Ely Cathedral and also enjoy a traditional Turkish meal...  I'll return to Turkey later.

I have also been working to finalise my input to the teacher training course which has been created by the D3: Developing Digital Data Literacy project. The first three modules have been fully finished, and I am also uploading some further materials to the website to finalise the 4th module which draws on the previous three. The context for this is the '15 minute city' and I was pleased to have a brief Twitter exchange with Carlos Moreno, who developed the idea.

This explores open data and how it can be used to help young people to make important decisions in their lives, now and in the future. It's also about understanding that their use of technology, which has increased during the last couple of years is creating a huge amount of data which could be valuable and also say a lot about them to advertisers and other companies such as Meta (the rebranded umbrella body including Facebook)

If you would like to be involved in trialling our Open Data resources and teacher training course then please get in touch with me.

The Turkish Geographers' Congress is called UCEK or IGCU, and this was the 3rd running of this large event with hundreds of papers and other sessions. I was one of the invited international speakers, which was an honour and had to cram it into a working day. I also did a Q and A with one of the organisers Eyüp Artvinli and the Australian geographer Susan Caldis.

I enjoyed speaking to over 200 Turkish geographers around the theme of Everyday Geographies. The session can be viewed on Facebook here, minus the opening minute of my talk, when I introduced myself to the delegates. I was very pleased to have been part of this international event.

I also involved myself in other events.

I am also awaiting the IGU's response to a session proosal for their conference in 2022. The date for this has now been put back into November so I am hoping that I might be able to attend the event in Paris later in my Presidency and also take in a visit to the iGEO Competition which would involve offering my support to the team selected as part of the Worldwise competition organised by the GA. There is a long association between the GA and the IGU, particularly via Norman Graves. This forms part of his entry on the GA Presidents blog.

The following Monday I spoke at a seminar organised by the Prince's Teaching Institute.

There was a session from me on how COVID19 has changed geographical thinking and elements of the curriculum. Thanks to those who came along. I shared a chronology of the pandemic and then the PTI Teacher Leader Catherine Bradley took over and worked with the delegates to connect it to the curriculum.

The SAGT Conference is a regular fixture on my annual calendar. I have attended many years since 2005, and this year was a second online conference of the Scottish Association of Geography Teachers. I presented on 'Landscapes of Abandonment' to fit the theme of rewilding. There were some very interesting keynotes on Scotland's landscape and the Alladale reserve connected with some current work. I was also delighted that 'Why Study Geography?' won a Highly Commended in the SAGT Publishers' Awards. I've previously won the Best Book Award but not this time.

There were lots of 'smaller' actions as well.

I sent off the 2nd draft of an article to Routes Journal on the research that I carried out to produce the GA Presidents blog. This was in response to the peer review. I also researched some images. This has been accepted for publication and I will share the link to the article once it is published early in the New Year.

GA Conference planning occupied a lot of time of course, with plenty of emails trying to finalise different elements.

This included the Future Geographers strand which is for students. It includes a link to elements of the main conference, and usually includes the President and Vice President as well. We will be publicising more details of this once finalised.

As always, I had conversations with numerous people on a range of topics including:

- the forthcoming Governing Body meeting in Sheffield

- forthcoming journal contents and articles

- GA Innovation Fund judging - this was completed and those who applied will find out the results in November

- sending off booking form for the Charney Manor Conference in February 2022.

I also signed the CSA for a forthcoming publication in 2022.

My LivingGeography blog also passed 6 million page views this month. Thanks for visiting. There's a lot of geography in just one site. Use the SEARCH function whatever you're teaching to find something useful.

I also read a lot of the new book by Parag Khanna called 'Move' and an excellent book by Jer Thorp called 'Living in Data'. 

Parag's book has some accompanying education materials which are worth taking a look at.

I also did some consultancy for a firm developing some exciting new materials - more when they emerge as well.

And finally, you have a week to apply to be the President of the GA for 2023-4 (following Alastair Owens) - deadline is 8th of November.

Twitter analytics for the month again.

Looking back, October has been rather busy. Let's see what November has to offer.