It has attracted some interest and had over 450 000 page views, which is not bad for a blog.
Thanks to all the GA Presidents - past, present and future for their support and contributions.
I have just passed 1000 posts on the blog.
Thanks for visiting and reading.
An election has been called to elect the GA President who will follow Catherine Owen as GA President, and serve for 2026-7.
Each year, there is a chance to put yourself forward for the GA Presidency. The next one is 2026-27.
The full details are, or will be on the GA website.
I've been connected with the RGS-IBG for quite a number of years in various ways, as were quite a few other former GA Presidents. I'm now about to strengthen those connections a little more.
In 2007 I became a Fellow of the RGS and Chartered Geographer (Teacher) and have been ever since.
In 2008, I was awarded their Ordnance Survey Award for excellence in Secondary Geography Teaching. This was a proud moment and came at the culmination (I thought) of my teaching career as I was joining the Geographical Association and stepping out of the classroom. I didn't realise I'd be back again within five years.I had also spoken at the RGS as part of a student day - with Alastair Owens actually - although I only found that out much later when digging through some old papers. It's a wonderful thing to stand on the stage in the Ondaatje Theatre where so many greats have stood before. We also took students there for a range of events, and I took part in an event representing the Guardian / DfE once as well. I ended up having lunch with Nicholas Crane and have bumped into all sorts of explorers and 'celebrity' geographers at times in the lunch area.
Between 2008 and 2011 I worked closely with the RGS - particularly Steve Brace - who is now the GA Chief Executive of course, and Claire Wheeler (now Claire Brown) along with the rest of their APG team as part of the Action Plan for Geography. This meant regular meetings at either the RGS or Solly Street at a time when Michael Palin was president.
From 2011 onwards for several years I contributed resources to the RGS website, thanks to Steve Brace. This included:
- From the Field resources - working with PhD researchers to translate their work into the classroom
- 'A' level / fieldwork materials funded by a Data Skills project
- a resource on Hunstanton's famous stripy cliffs
- the education materials for Felicity Aston's Going Beyond funded trip to the Pole of Cold - these won an award from the SAGT.
If you are a fellow, you will have received your electronic 'ballot paper' for the elections for Council for June 2024 and will perhaps have noticed that I have put myself forward for the post of Vice President: Education. I had to keep this to myself for a while.
From June I shall therefore be taking on the role of Vice President: Education at the RGS and have a place on RGS Council for a four year term of office.
Thanks to the fine people who proposed me for the position, including a Polar explorer and some very excellent geography teacher colleagues.
Thanks also must go to my predecessor as VP Education: Mel Norman, who has also been closely associated with the Geographical Association. She Chaired and was Co-Chair/Secretary of the GA's Education Group and was also editor of 'Teaching Geography' for a lengthy period.
She taught PGCE Geographers for many years - I visited her cohorts a few times while working for the GA - and is also closely associated with the organisation of the Charney Manor Primary Geography Conference. I'm hoping she will pass on more of her wisdom, much as she did when I started my GA Presidency. Speaking of which, Mel is one of those people who has not been GA President (yet) but would be fantastic in the role. She has received awards from the GA for her work in a range of spheres.
If you're going to be at the AGM / Awards or reception in the evening it would be fantastic to catch up.
I shall be back with more requests as I get started on the role in the summer.
I look forward to working with all the various Council and committee members, RGS staff and the new incoming President Professor Dame Jane Francis, who received the RGS's Patron's Medal in 2022.
There is work to be done to ensure that all the ongoing support that the RGS offers for teachers meets their needs, and continues to be responsive and inclusive to the changing needs of the profession. I'm excited to offer my support in various ways.
Image: Sam Parkinson
The Autumn 2023 issue of the GA Magazine is now available to download online, with printed copies arriving before too long.
Among the news and updates on the GA's wider activities, there is the annual call for nominations to serve as the GA's President for 2025-26, following on from Hina Robinson.
It would be great to continue the run of teacher Presidents - not sure we've ever had three teacher Presidents in a row in the GA's history.
I've previously blogged about myself when I started as President.
I started my involvement with the GA Secondary Phase Committee around 2004-5, thanks to Rob Lodge who got me involved, and this was when I first encountered Alan Kinder, who was co-chair for a while. I later worked for the GA for three years - starting there 15 years ago tomorrow.
Thanks to everyone involved in the last four years of my Presidential journey, who has supported me in the process - there's a lot of people I could mention here from fellow Trustees, volunteers and those who serve on the committees and SIGs, staff at Solly Street and all those who are GA members. It's been a privilege. It's also my last day of four years as a Trustee and serving on the Governing Body, having also been Chair of Education Group for a year as well, and with previously working on the Secondary Phase Committee for about ten years on and off... and also writing the GA Webwatch column for about twelve years.
I hope I've pushed the idea of Quotidian geographies a little more into the spotlight. I think the GA has certainly changed during my time in the Presidential cycle.
Special mention to Jeremy Krause for his encouragement before and kind words after. Also thanks to Paula Owens and Steve Rawlinson for the original 'push': a few years earlier than I was originally planning.
I shall continue to develop the blog and add more stories from the archives and updates on Presidents as I find them, or they are communicated to me. I hope the project might one day find its way into a different (perhaps even printed or extended digital) form when I have time to do it a little more justice and carry out the necesary research. I need to renew my British Library Reading Room membership which lapsed just after the pandemic.
It's over to Denise Freeman and Hina Robinson tomorrow for the next couple of years of female teacher Presidents - there have been very few of those, so feel free to throw your hat into the ring.
Keep an eye out for your chance to put yourself forward to be GA President in 2025-2026.
Nominations will be asked for before too long.
Image: Selfie taken as I left the University of Guildford campus following my GA Presidential conference in 2022... a job well done....
Word cloud of Presidents updated too...
Quick trivia quiz question: Which three surnames have been shared by more than one President?
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Today several colleagues finish their terms in trustee roles @The_GA...
— Alastair Owens (@AlastairHackney) August 31, 2023
A very big thank you to Olwen Lintern-Smyth our outgoing chair, @bobdigby Honorary Treasurer, Sue Holden, @GeoBlogs Immediate Past President, and Dan Cowling, for their vision, commitment and hard work! pic.twitter.com/ah232Ye7Je
According to this UCL research paper:
Figures from 2019 show that 85.6% of all teachers and 65.4% of pupils are currently from a White British background; in comparison, 78.5% of the working age population of England were recorded as White British in the 2011 census
(UK Government, 2020).
To date, 100% of GA Presidents have been 'White British' (with the occasional French-born President, and others born overseas).
This needs to change.
If you would like to be involved in changing this narrative, we are now looking for the next GA President after Denise Freeman, who will be President in 2023-4.
Nominations need to be in by the 1st of November.
You will see that there are also some other vacancies which we would welcome applicants.
OK, the final month of the GA Presidency arrives, and with it comes the annual meetings and work on the moderation for the Primary and Secondary Geography Quality Marks.
I started this month during the summer holidays, enjoying the break from the classroom down in Devon.
Topsham is a place we return to each summer. During the week I caught up with some old friends - Dan Raven Ellison and Noel Jenkins.
With Dan, I walked one of the Slow Ways routes.
I'd previously worked with Claire Kyndt and Kate Stockings to create some ideas for geography teachers to engage with the Slow Ways project. Perhaps you have walked one of the routes this summer?
SGQM is the Secondary Geography Quality Mark. I have been involved in the moderation of this since the beginning of the award. Moderation meetings were done online this time round. I had nine schools to moderate in the first round of moderation and then took another look at several others in the second round of moderation. There were some excellent applications this year. Those who have applied will find out the results at the start of the academic year.
I spent quite a lot of the month reading - a mixture of books for future teaching and others on topics of personal interest. I also spent quite a lot of days at home rather than out and about because of the climate change induced heat we experienced this August - which will hopefully trigger some sort of policy response amongst politicians. I won't hold my breath though.
Sheffield is where the GA's HQ is located. I haven't been up there as regularly as almost all GA Presidents due to the advent of Zoom. Previously, regular visits to Solly Street were part of the Presidential year, but this is no longer the case, which potentially broadens the range of people who may be able to apply.
I was able to get involved with some early conference planning decisions.
I also helped with the plans for some new features for the GA website - an updated version of which is coming at the end of the year all being well. There are thousands of pages on the website.
I also looked at applications to join the GA's register of consultants. This is a list of people who can be approached to potentially work on projects with you if you are business or school and need help with writing resources, or some other sort of staff development. I've completed quite a lot of consultancy work over the years on behalf of the GA.
I also wrote some text for a new GA Blog, which is going to be launched soon to help share what the Association is up to.
A GI Pedagogy meeting was also planned to take place towards the end of the month and was pushed to the very end of the month, when I started to prepare for the return to school for the start of yet another academic year. I had been due to go to Iasi in Romania this month as part of the project but that has now been postponed and we may end up going later in the year, or perhaps to another location closer to home.
I have several things already in the pipeline for the next year to fill the gap:
- mentoring a new GA Trustee as well as supporting other members of the Presidential team as Past President.
- going back to writing my Everyday Geographies book which I had made a start on before it got overtaken with other projects this year. It's taking shape quite nicely.
- I've joined the GeographySouthWest team. I had a meeting with Simon Ross and John Davidson who started the website and are now developing it a little more. I am going to be working with Emma Espley to create some resources and also
- I will be completing my Fawcett Fellowship which I have received funding for - there are six other Fawcett Fellows and I look forward to working with them and Alex Standish over the year ahead, researching Everyday Geographies and the curriculum.
- I have some final work to do on the GI Pedagogy project.
- I also have some writing projects to complete
Best of luck to the new President for 2022-23.
Twitter stats
Later on, I shall post a biography of Professor Alastair Owens.
I will move on to a year as Past President.
Also welcome to Denise Freeman as the new Vice President of the Geographical Association - possibly the first serving female state school President I believe... we have had a few other female teacher Presidents including Pat Cleverley, Sheila Jones and Wendy Atkins (Morgan) but they were either working in Independent schools or had retired when they became President I think from my research.
It's important that we have teacher Presidents and it would be lovely for them to be more diverse than previously.
For me, the month started with a flurry of activity and continued to be busy for most of it.
The first main event was the PTI Subject Enrichment Residential.
This is an annual event (now back after several years when it could not take place).
It is hosted by Cambridge University, and takes place at Downing College, which is close to the city centre, and runs across three days.
Claire Kyndt, my colleague also presented her ideas which were based on the Dear Data project: data visualisation.
This was followed by a trip to Parker's Piece to carry out some fieldwork. This included a range of options for collecting data or interacting with the place.
Interestingly, the area was occupied by the stalls, stage and other elements of a free weekend Mela event. This included an observation wheel which Claire and I went on for a good view of the area, across the city, and with a distant view of Ely Cathedral on the horizon. There was some good feedback from the delegates.
It was then down to Stansted to catch a flight to Madrid. Thanks to Claire for giving me a lift to the airport. Thanks also to Miguel-Angel for picking me up.
I was there for 4 days to lead a course for the GI Pedagogy project. We were hosted by UNED.
The GI Pedagogy project had received an extension of four months from the British Council.
I've previously blogged about the nature of this project, and the one that predated it. I co-presented the introduction to the 3 day course, and multiplier event with my colleague Michaela Lindner Fally from Borg Obendorf school in Austria.
The training course at UNED took place on Monday to Wednesday.
We are grateful to the delegates who joined us from a number of countries. There were also quite a few online delegates.
Luc Zwartjes, one of my colleagues was leading quite a few of the sessions, and was then heading off to the ESRI User Conference in San Diego where he also presented our project to a good audience.
GI Pedagogy presented at #Esri EDUC 2022 pic.twitter.com/WfgmDpc3hJ
— GI Pedagogy (@GIPedagogy) July 9, 2022
Final days of term then followed, which were also hot, and included the Powerhouse Games with John Willis and the team.
A Governance Working Group meeting also took place, where there were several important items to consider for next year. This is part of the strategy work which the President is involved in. It took place in London as a 'central' location for most of us.
There were also plenty of submissions to look at from the GA's two Quality Marks: Primary and Secondary. This has been part of my summer routine for over ten years now. There were plenty of entries, which is great to see.
The PGQM is the Primary Geography Quality Mark which schools can apply for. I have been moderating applications for some years now, and this year there were a growing number of schools as some had deferred
I was involved in a Zoom meeting with a school which had opted to go straight to an application for Gold. This was a lovely chance to find out more about the way that a few individuals can make such an impact within a school.
The IGU Centenary Congress took place in Paris, following another related event in Rennes the week before.
The GA has been connected with the IGU for some time now, with the work of former GA Presidents such as L Dudley Stamp and Norman Graves.
Sadly, this coincided with a heatwave and unprecedented heat and my travel plans were thwarted at the last minute as trains were delayed and I missed the Eurostar, which it then turns out was delayed by over three hours and took about six hours to make the journey. The heat in Paris was a factor, along with vandalism of the power lines.
The return journey also looks like being problematic.
This was a bit of a disaster as I'd spent weeks working out my itinerary of various adventures around the IGU sessions that I was involved in, with some Georges Perec fieldwork to carry out.
The paper I'd worked on can be viewed and downloaded from ResearchGate.
It was great to see that our GI Pedagogy project was presented at the IGU however, and with a great turn out for the session.
We also had some unprecedented heat, so instead of suffering 40 degrees in Paris I was present to experience 40 degree heat in the UK instead, which led to fires destroying houses just 20 miles from where I live.
This map highlights the places that are forecast to be hotter than the UK on Tuesday.
— Ben Noll (@BenNollWeather) July 16, 2022
It's about 1.2% of the planet's surface. pic.twitter.com/1CW6krIOtb
There were other jobs to do this month:
Topsham in Devon is a place which we have been visiting as a family for many years and we generally stay in the same place, which sits right on the River Exe. It was great to be back again.
Here's the Cobb at Lyme Regis:
The month ends with the usual Twitter stats, which show a busy month but one which had fewer tweets than usual - a pattern likely to be continued next week.
This leaves just one month to go and then my year as President will be over all too quickly.
I hope to pass on my experiences to future Presidents and I hope my Presidents blog project will be a legacy that I will add to when I get the chance to visit the GA Archives.
Images: Alan Parkinson, Sophie Wilson, Luc Zwartjes
May can be a bit of an anti-climax after the GA Conference which is held in April, but it also marks the start of the final third of the Presidential term, when thoughts turn towards legacy and also transition for the incoming President as well.
I started the final third of my GA Presidency this month. The work continues though for all GA Presidents (and also the Vice and Past President)
I started the month by checking 2nd proofs of an article I had been asked to contribute to one of the GA's Journals: Teaching Geography, which began in 1975 with Patrick Bailey as the Editor. This will be published in the Summer 2022 edition.
The GA's Governance Working Group meets ahead of the GA Governing Body, to set the Agenda and also consider some strategic decisions and thinking. We decided on a date for meetings later in the month and year.
The official images from the GA Conference are generally shared by the end of April, and work goes on to write an illustrated summary of the event for the GA Magazine. These were added to a Flickr album here. See if you can spot yourself if you were there. If you missed the event completely you can purchase a set of recordings from the GA Shop.
The Geographers Gaze project moved on with web pages being built and captions added from the work I completed with Peter Fox.
I had a CPD meeting with Guy Nunnerley - the Head of Geography at Wisbech Grammar School - regarding my own PDR (Professional Development Review) - an annual or biannual obligation for many teachers - focussing on KS2-3 transition. Thanks to Guy, who I used to work with when he started out in his career - for giving up the time to meet with me and share what he and his department are doing, and their plans for next year. It's important as teachers that we get to see what other schools are doing and I've been very fortunate to visit hundreds of schools over the years in various roles.
Open Day was held on the 7th of May at school - we welcomed visitors and parents who were thinking of joining the school. I then headed home to join the Charney Online Conference.
This was an excellent one-day event with good conversations. I used the presentation here:
Thanks for the kind words. I also learned a lot from the other presenters and have access to their presentations as well.
The following week was a D3 Multiplier Event.
The GI Pedagogy project had been presented at the EuroGeo Conference in Mytiline in Greece the weekend before but I was unable to be there. We heard that the British Council had approved an extension due to COVID preventing a lot of our work, which was good news, so thanks to them. Another ERASMUS project involving my school: Rise the Life was also able to carry out its long delayed residential mobility to Turkey as well.
The ESRI UK User Conference returned to a face-to-face format, and I had permission to make my way down there. Sophie Wilson and Brendan Conway from the GI Pedagogy team were there. I also had the chance to meet up with the ESRI Education folks, Steve Brace from the RGS, Shanique Harris (who is leading a new RGS project called Geography for All) and Francisca Rockey from the Black Geographers group.
I had articles published in three of the GA's journals - I missed out on 'Geography' this time round. Catch them here if you are a subscriber.
Add them to your membership perhaps.
There was also a meeting of the GI Pedagogy project the following week.
Other things that I did this month:
- Completed some consultancy for a VR firm who are building scenes for students to explore with additional educational content.
- A day working at the Forum library in Norwich
- Attending part of a meeting of the GA's Post 16 and HE Committee - one of several who support the work of the GA and give up time to meet at weekends and also complete work according to a Work Plan which is then reported to Education Group.
- Discussions with Alastair Owens: the GA Vice President, about the format of the GA's Awards and preparations of papers for Governing Body
- Working on some resources for TeachIt Geography
- Working on a forthcoming book project which I can't mention
- Consultancy with a design agency
- Worked on some materials for the BBC to accompany a film made by De'Graft Mensah, which is part of a series on Empire and Ghana (where his family is from).
COBRIG is the Council of British Geography and has been in existence for many years.
The Council seeks to include representatives of all major geographical organisations in the UK. It invites representatives from the following organisations:Alan Kinder was unable to attend and asked me to stand in for him. We had several papers which were included in the agenda and I gave an update on activity largely based on the National Research Report.
The final week brought some more projects:
- an article for a cartography magazine, which looks good
- some consultancy with a design agency and others
- preparing for the next Governing Body meeting in June by writing some papers
- many personal emails and DMs on social media to share resources and ideas
- discussions around GIS use in the profession
GeogPod is the GA's Podcast, which is hosted by John Lyon. There have been over 50 episodes of the podcast so far, and remarkably I hadn't been asked to do one until now.
Paula Richardson and I were interviewed about the National Fieldwork Week. This runs from the 6th to the 10th of June.
This should be out next week.
The month ended with the start of half term holiday. Just another half term to go before a much needed summer break, when I hope to progress some projects but also decompress as we approach the end of my Presidential term, and support those stepping up to the next stage: Alastair Owens and Denise Freeman.
I was also interviewed on the morning show on BBC Radio Guernsey.
You can listen again until the end of June. I'm on from 11.16-11.30
The usual Twitter stats at the end of the month. Quite a lot down on the previous month which had all the tweets relating to the GA Conference which were all amplified.
That's three quarters of my Presidential year done.
Updated post. Sad news at the end of last week from colleagues who have organised the Charney Conference over the years of the passing of Ma...
