Fawcett Fellowship Research Questionnaire - your help is requested

Updated

Thanks to those colleagues who helped out.

I'm proud to have been a UCL-IOE Fawcett Fellow for this academic year, working with others to explore curriculum thinking and epistemic quality in the curriculum.

In 1987 Edith Fawcett endowed annual Fellowships in the Department of Geography at UCL in memory of her father, Professor C B Fawcett, who was head of the department between 1928 and 1949. The Fellowships were originally designed to enable UK-based teachers and other professional geographers in mid-career to spend a sabbatical term studying at UCL. The teaching Fellows continued to be paid their full salary and the scheme funded replacement geography teaching. This has now been opened up to a second model, where regular meetings are held across a year. 

This year's group of fellows has had regular meetings at UCL, and discussions about curriculum, curriculum making and the influences which shape our professional practice. We have been discussing our decisions over what to teach, how to sequence it, and how to assess it. We have been using a number of books for inspiration, which have included the excellent David Gardner book published by the GA and others, including Alex Standish. We are drawn from different stages of our careers and different school contexts. It's been fascinating to learn from the other fellows, and I have a bulging notebook of notes and documents. We also have an input from Dr. Alex Standish during each session, and are also encouraged to follow up the Fellowship by applying for Masters level study.

We are now reaching the final stage of the year, and writing up our research and thinking. I've now got ethics clearance to launch the questionnaire which will inform the final part of my work and writing. The questionnaire is linked to and also embedded below.

This questionnaire is aimed at teachers who teach GEOGRAPHY, and refers to these lessons specifically. You don't have to be a full time Geography teacher to get involved. All responses are anonymous and may be referenced in a chapter for a forthcoming publication on curriculum thinking in geography. 

The aim of my Fawcett Fellowship is to research the impact of "everyday geographies" and how these are unpicked and taught by individual schools. My GA Presidential theme for 2021-22 was Everyday Geographies, and an exploration of the quotidian. 

As significant local / national / global news stories and related content (such as images and videos on social media accounts) appear, I'm keen to discover  how  you, as geography  teachers, react  to them and make time for them. 

This is particularly aimed at KS3 Geography teachers, but KS2 teachers would also be welcome to respond.

At  what point might these news stories prove weighty enough to displace other content in your curriculum and earn a place in your curriculum for the next few years, and what thought is given to the longevity of these stories placed against topics which form a stronger foundation for GCSE courses as they appear in the specification?  How are these stories combined with existing curriculum content, or used to displace previous case studies? Is thought given to how this might create an imbalance in the parts of the world covered, or the extent to which this reinforces partial views of the world?

Is there a tendency for these topics to skew curriculum offerings away from ‘physical geography’ or what might be considered important disciplinary knowledge because of their nature? Are more news stories likely to be what might be termed 'human' or 'environmental geography'?

I'd be interested in your thoughts on the questions below. 

Please provide as much detail as you are happy to provide.

You can fill in the survey on the embedded form below, or by clicking this link.

I am very grateful for any and all contributions.

If you want to let me know more thoughts, feel free to add a comment on the blogpost below, or DM me on Twitter: @GeoBlogs.

The application process for next year's Fawcett Fellowship will be open shortly, and I shall let you know all the details as soon as they are available.

Professor Alice Coleman - RIP

'Bad design does not determine anything, but it increases the odds against which people have to struggle to maintain civilised standards'

Alice Coleman

I recently heard that Alice Coleman had sadly passed away just short of her 100th birthday.

We had prepared a celebration of her work with the help of Peter Vujakovic. It was published in the Summer 2023 issue of GA Magazine.

GA Magazine is received three times a year by GA members.

There will be further comment later, but the piece can be seen below. Alice leaves a tremendous legacy of work and did a great deal to support and further the cause of the GA in several respects. I have a copy of the handbook for the Land Use Survey she coordinated. 

She was a teacher, as well as working at King's College, London - with which the GA has had many close connections over the years.

Alice Coleman from GeoBlogs

Update

An obituary of #geographer Prof Alice Coleman is included in the latest episode of @BBCRadio4
The Last Word by @Bannmatt

Listen belowhttps://t.co/y7uDYsOkZ0

— Steve Brace (@SteveBraceGeog) June 9, 2023

Telegraph obituary. 

Just hearing @LorettaCLees
talking of theory iflack of defensible space in modernist housing developed in #geographer Alice Coleman's work. & Coleman's advocacy her work to M. Thatcher & taking Prince Charles on field trip to the blocks too #thelastwordhttps://t.co/y7uDYsOkZ0

— Steve Brace (@SteveBraceGeog) June 11, 2023

Reading

Utopia on Trial - available from the Internet Archive. 

Update August 2023

Here's an image of Alice with a former GA President: W G V Balchin.

He was the guest speaker at the GA Thanet Branch in 1996

Alice wrote Balchin's Obituary for the GA.

Tribute to pioneering geography professor and former Broadstairs resident Alice Coleman - https://t.co/WXkdXKgaYq

— Isle of Thanet News (@IsleThanetNews) June 13, 2023

Tribute to pioneering geography professor and former Broadstairs resident Alice Coleman - https://t.co/WXkdXKgaYq

— Isle of Thanet News (@IsleThanetNews) June 13, 2023

Bob Digby on Coffee and Geography

Bob Digby was the GA President in 2012.

Here he is talking to Kit Rackley.

Bill Mead on the Commonplace

"A commonplace book has no ending; the snapping up of unconsidered trifles continues"

A little post in response to a post by Ryan Bate over on his blog from earlier today.

Ryan talked about the idea of the commonplace book.

He describes them as:

notebooks which act as a record of any and all interesting quotes, facts and ideas that a person would come across in the course of their reading and other pursuits.

I guess a blog is a modern example of a commonplace book. I mentioned a Commonplace Book that I own, whose cover is pictured here, compiled by Professor Bill Mead.

It was published in 2015, and was unfortunately published posthumously by John T Smith, who had been working on the book with Bill - who died just over a week short of what would have been his 100th birthday.

Bill was GA President in 1981. I met him several times when he came to Solly Street, and also at GA Conferences. He was a true gentleman and also an expert on Scandinavian geography.

The book is a collection of lecture transcripts (some previously unpublished - often on the theme of Finland and Scandinavia but ranging over a great many themes), including landscapes, statistics and Bill's own varied and rather wonderful life. He describes how he jotted down quotes from books in his home, and filled over 20 notebooks over the years - filling them with extracts and things which drew his attention. 

Such work relies on serendipitous discovery, and I've certainly done that over the years.

The book also includes a quote from a Historian called Zachris Topelius which I appropriated from my GA Presidential Lecture.

Bill provides a copy of the Maconochie Lecture he delivered at UCL forty years ago called 'Changing Lives, Changing Landscapes'. It also includes images of GA Presidents at a gathering, which was helpful for the research for my GA Presidents Blog.

There's also an excellent piece on the changing language of geography, which references the work of another former GA President Sidney Wooldridge who (with G Gordon East) wrote 'The Spirit and Purpose of Geography', of which I have a 1955 copy along with Dudley Stamp, Frank Monkhouse (the definitive text for my own 'A' level geography revision) and Torsten Hägerstrand.

There are some great quotes which I've gleaned for my own version of a 'commonplace book': these include:

"the principle of progress is the principle of superfluity' - Edwin Muir

"Rocks are metaphors for lansdscapes past" - Robert MacFarlane

"What makes life worth living is not the pursuit of happiness, but the happiness of the pursuit" - Brian Little

and this with which I shall conclude this post:

"Every continent has its own spirit of place. Every people is polarised in some particular locality, which is home, the homeland. Different places on the face of the earth hafe different vital effleuence, different vibration, different chemical exhalation, different polarity with different stars; call it what you like. But the spirit of place is a great reality." - D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classical Americal Literature, 1924

From the archive - letter to Fairgrieve

Occasional images taken in the GA archive.

This an image regarding a Geography Society set up at St. Marylebone Grammar School from 1946.

Read more about Fairgrieve here.