Friday 1 July 2022

GA Presidency Month 10: June 2022

June is the final major month of the school year - for me at least - there are others who have to go on for quite a long way into July, or who have perhaps largely finished by then depending on which country they teach in, and the relative importance of the exam season to their timetable.

The first part of the month was during my half term, which included the Jubilee weekend, but it was certainly back with a bang to the final half term of the year.

National Fieldwork Week ran from 6th-10th of June. We hope it may be back next year.


The week had the theme of CHANGE. 

The latest GeogPod was released on the 4th of June, and features Paula Richardson and I talking about the GA's National Research Report and how that fed into the development of the National Fieldwork Week.


Thanks to John Lyon for hosting - see if you can spot the question I wasn't expecting... :) 

Day by Day

6th of June

The RGS-IBG AGM, followed by the Awards Ceremony was on my original agenda, but the tube strike led me to have to cancel these plans unfortunately.

And then the weather on Monday morning was torrential rain followed by a lull when I managed to get outside with one group.

Colleagues in other years also got involved.

7th of June

The sun shone and I went outside with all of my groups.

8th of June

The weather changed back to rain, which started to clear by mid morning. This time I was able to get out with a group and explore changes in Ely.

9th of June

Three groups went out today.

I went on a Cambridge GA Branch Walk through the CB1 redevelopment in the evening.

This was organised by the Cambridge GA Branch and led by former GA President Chris Kington - it was very entertaining and informative. Also attended by another former GA President: Keith Grimwade.


10th of June

Southwold

Chris Webster has run the Southwold-based Geography Fieldwork Academy for a number of years, although he returned to the classroom during the lockdown and mothballed the operation. It is now back up and running and offering NEA and other sessions for students.

They have also created the GeogIt app.

I visited them for the day.

This included a quick tour of Southwold with Chris where I ended up seeing a few new developments in the town and talking to the Mayor as well as seeing the classroom spaces which Chris makes use of when he has groups of varying sizes.

At the end of the day, we had a picture taken with the group he was helping that day. It turned out to be the college where my own children went! (although they didn't do Geography...)

In between this I also found time to have a lovely lunch and a pint of Adnams (of course) in the Sole Bay Inn.


There were many other Presidential bits and pieces that happened in the middle part of the month. I'm missing out all the usual tweets 

On the 17th of June it was the start of the planning for Conference 2023 with the first Conference Planning Board meeting for 2023. This lasted for two hours, and as President I chaired this particular meeting. The next meeting will be chaired by Alastair Owens as he will have started his Presidential term by then. Next year's conference will take place in Sheffield between the 13th and 15th of April. The theme is 'Collaborative Geographies'.

GA Governing Body meeting was next up.

This took place at Queen Mary University, London

I travelled down to London on the train on the hottest day of the year so far and ended up (after a detour to Hammersmith) at my hotel in Brick Lane. The evening before was a meeting followed by a curry and drinks at Aladin restuarant on Brick Lane itself.

Can I recommend the Premier Inn Hub hotels if you are staying in the area for an evening.

This was followed by a Governing Body meeting with a very full agenda on a very hot day. There are three GB meetings a year. It was the final meeting for several trustees, including Susan Pike, whose term as Past President is also coming to an end at the same time as my Presidency will. I have three more GB meetings to attend in that capacity before ending my term. There are also co-opted and named trustees and I could also put myself forward for election. We heard the results of the recent Trustee election, which will be revealed later in the year.

I also spent an afternoon talking to the PGCE colleagues at Homerton College.

This was a useful taster of my Prince's Teaching Institute session, which also includes my colleague Claire Kyndt. Booking details were here.

Events continued to appear in my calendar:

- GI Pedagogy meeting where we discussed the progress made so far and planned for the next phase of the project - this also culminated in planning for an event next month in Madrid which took a great deal of my time

- Additional meeting at Homerton College for mentors as well as students to look at fieldwork - this was sadly disrupted by the train strike, so I had to do it virtually for an hour which was a little more stilted as a consequence than a face to face event but I'm told by a few people there that it was well received and very useful for their future roles

- Consultancy over a new resource on the theme of disasters, with an educator currently based in Australia - this follows an earlier resource based on Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.

- Discussions over a new Primary resource coming in 2024 which I will work on over the summer, along with a new GIS resource

- Edits for an article that is going to appear in the next issue of the British Cartographical Society's magazine Maplines

- Small input to GeogLive!9 on the topic of fieldwork - mostly to thank everyone who had put together some inputs and who had contributed to the Fieldwork Week itself. It's been great to see the support of the EYPPC in particular for this event.

- Reading minutes of the various phase committees and other groups who meet several times a year to discuss how they can support the Association and fellow members - it's important as President to try to keep across all this activity, and there is a lot of it. 

Other things I got up to:

GeogMeet has been organised by James Riley from the Perse School in Cambridge for the last four years or so. It has been disrupted due to the pandemic. The recordings are available on the GeogMeet YouTube channel.

I was going to say hello in person, but instead I had to record a hello message to the student presenters. 

- Travelled down to London to see Pat Metheny at the Eventim Apollo - the first time I've seen him since a trip to Hull City Hall before lockdown during the city's time as City of Culture - it was a remarkable concert - I also took the opportunity to wander a bit of West London that I hadn't been to before (or at least for a while) It was a superb concert as well.

We also had a whole late flurry of activity:

- discussions on the ongoing work on the GA website

- ideas for further support for members as the year progresses

- planning for further strategy meetings

The final bit of good news for the month arrived on the last day of the month. We had been waiting for the final report from EPOS: the Belgian agency for ERASMUS projects, on our D3 Project.

The objectives of the D3 project were to:
1. Promote the use digital technologies and open data tools in learning and teaching.
2. Increase the capacity of learning and teaching to integrate democratic engagement considerations into educational plans and strategies.
3. Establish suitable styles of learning to access and integrate open data into schools and
4. Improve educational stakeholders’ response to the need for data and information literacy in schools and teacher training.

We had a very positive final report on the project, and I was particularly pleased to have written a series of lesson blueprints which were featured here, and animated by Greg Donert.


Ending with the usual Twitter stats for the month - a lot of National Fieldwork Week tweeting has upped the number again, and also the impressions - I had almost 100 000 impressions of my tweets during that week alone.

Looking at my stats in the last ten months, it's clear that being President of the GA increases your followers. Since I opened up my tweets from their previous private status at the start of my Presidential year, I've added over 2000 new followers. 

I'll be closing my tweets again on August the 31st and weeding out any accounts that aren't authentic.

Just two months to go now. Next month looks just as busy as this one to be fair.

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