Margaret told me:
"My most vivid
memories of school were school trips. I went to Windsor Castle when I was 9, my
first visit to England, and to Bordeaux and Hanover, to stay with families on
school exchanges, when I was 14 and 17. My parents never had a car or went
abroad and we never went far, but I longed to travel. It was my interest in
places and people that triggered my interest in geography.
Unlike other past
presidents, I was not inspired by my geography teachers. It was my A level biology teacher
whose lessons I enjoyed most; she shared her curiosity and sense of wonder in
the subject and we did a lot of practical work. I would have studied biology at
university but had stopped studying chemistry at the age of 14. I am perhaps an
accidental geographer! In a gap between
school and university I worked for three months in an ice-cream parlour in
Hanover washing up dishes. Other holiday jobs included working in a guesthouse
in Cornwall, a bookshop in Bristol and cleaning public baths in Bristol.
I went to Cambridge
University and was a student at New Hall, then newly established (now Murray
Edwards College). It had no buildings and in our first year we lived in
Darwin’s old house, now Darwin College. There were only sixteen students in each
year and the life-long friends I made were studying different subjects:
English; natural sciences; history; maths and economics, a broadening
experience. As New Hall had no geography tutors, my weekly supervisions were in
other colleges: Newnham, Trinity and in my final year, with Gus Caesar in St
Catharine’s College.
Gus has his own entry on the blog, and was mentioned by a number of other St. Catharine's alumni. This places Margaret in a special group of former GA Presidents.
When Gus Caesar died, Ashley Kent and Michael
Bradford (who also feature on this blog of course) kindly contacted Margaret so that she could go to his memorial service with
them in Cambridge.
Margaret told me that her time at Cambridge studying geography
was exciting:
"...with access to the latest research and thinking; Richard Chorley
and Peter Haggett were among the lecturers.
I was struck by how cross-curricular geography was, with most lecturers
referring to other disciplines: history, geology, climatology, chemistry,
physics and economics. What made the biggest impact on me, however, was getting
a geography department travel award to do my undergraduate dissertation in
Ghana, studying development in a rural area east of Accra. The time I spent
getting there on a French boat where my companions were African students from Senegal
and Guinea and the time interviewing subsistence farmers, together with short
stays in a school and training colleges in other parts of Ghana, transformed my
understanding of development and colonialism. I wanted to get back to Africa
and did a PCGE so that I could travel. I never did get to work in Africa but married
a South African and visited South Africa many times."
Margaret completed her PGCE at
the London Institute of Education and, at her request, did her teaching practice
at Kidbrooke comprehensive school whose first headteacher Mary Green had been
head at Colston’s Girls’ School.
Career
- 1962-1968
Minchenden School, Southgate, London, where I became coordinator of Sixth Form
General Studies
- 1968-1970 Team
member of the Nuffield Foundation Resources for Learning Project
- 1970-1976
Countesthorpe Upper School and Community College, Leicestershire (part-time): responsibility
for A level geography.
- 1980-1981 City
School, Sheffield (part-time)
- 1982-2006
University of Sheffield, Lecturer, PGCE geography tutor (part-time until 1987)
Margaret told me of her own teaching experience (remember that not every GA President has this):
"At Minchenden School
the head of English, Douglas Barnes, took an interest my teaching and, because
of interest in Language across the curriculum, got me involved in conferences
of the London Association for the Teaching of English (LATE). Douglas encouraged
my use of exploratory talk and writing in the classroom. I devised and taught Sixth Form
General Studies courses on South Africa, the Press and Current Affairs.
The Nuffield
Foundation Resources for Learning Project was set up to promote more active
learning in the classroom, where students could work more independently at
their own pace using resources, with guidance. I was responsible for
humanities, supported by Michael Armstrong, Deputy Project Director. The theme
I was given was ‘the USA’ and I produced resources and guidelines for use by
history, geography and RE teachers in comprehensive schools in London and
Oxfordshire on: The First Americans; Black America (including extracts from
black writers) and A Nation of Immigrants (white America).
Countesthorpe
College, Leicestershire, which opened in 1970, was the vision of Tim McMullen,
a former Director of the Resources for Learning Project. Four members of the Resources
for Learning team got teaching posts there, keen to put into practice what the
project had advocated. There was almost no whole class teaching; students
learnt mainly through resource-based learning and investigative project work,
often done in small groups. Students received a lot of individual attention. It
was an exciting school intellectually for both students and teachers.
Margaret took a career break after the birth of her daughter, but spent her time marking CSE and O Level geography papers and did a ceramics diploma evening
course (even considering becoming a potter). She also actually retrained as a Maths teacher
(after doing A Level maths) as there was a glut of teachers and she wanted to get
back into teaching part-time. She told me:
"I must be the only PGCE tutor ever to have done
teaching practice (teaching bottom set maths students in Sheffield comprehensive
schools) in the year before starting the job."
She may well be right there...
Margaret spent many years at Sheffield University, also home to the GA.
"I worked as PGCE
geography tutor and eventually as Director of PGCE, at Sheffield University
from 1982 (part time initially) until my retirement in 2006. My course, influenced
by the language across the curriculum movement, included pre-Teaching Practice
visits to schools to interview individual students about place, to teach
planned lessons to small groups and to carry out a simulated public meeting
role play, all emphasising the value of listening and talk. There was a lot of
discussion and group work in university-based sessions. My ideas on
enquiry-based learning, developed during my experiences with the Resources for
Learning Project and at Countesthorpe College, were further influenced by the Schools
Council geography projects which were used widely in the partner schools. (see separate blog post on the Schools Council project)
My
research, using questionnaire surveys and interviews, focused on the geography
national curriculum and learning through enquiry.
Margaret's personal geographical education contained at the same time, she told me:
"In my first three
jobs, I had been incredibly fortunate to find myself, by chance, working with
such brilliant, stimulating teachers, most notably Douglas Barnes, Michael
Armstrong and Pat D’Arcy, each of whom developed my educational thinking. But
none of these was a geographer.
So, the Geographical Association was particularly
important for me as it gave me the opportunity to meet inspiring geography educators
and to become part of the geography education community. I initially felt
overawed at meeting, at GA Teacher education conferences, well known authors
such as Bill Marsden, Rex Walford and Frances Slater and people involved in
Schools Council Projects: Eleanor Rawling, Ashley Kent and Michael Naish. But I
found them approachable, supportive and encouraging. I gradually became more
involved with the GA and over the years have been on several committees,
including Council, Publications, Teacher Education Working Group and a Research
group. The GA gave me opportunities to publish chapters in its secondary handbooks,
articles in its journals and ‘Learning through Enquiry’ which was based on my
PGCE course. So, it was easy to choose my Presidential conference theme
‘Investigating Geography’.
She told me of her own Presidential year:
"I was fortunate
during my Presidential year to have the support of David Lambert, then Chief
Executive of the GA. He decided to launch ‘a different view’, the GA's impressive
Manifesto for Geography, in my conference slot, but having timed my lecture
carefully I was worried about how much of my time he would use up! I was delighted
that this conference included, for the first time, a slot for research
presentations and a special session for PGCE students, an earlier initiative of
Michael Bradford’s that I had strongly supported. I think it is important for
new teachers, whatever other networks they can now join, to become members of the
professional community of geography teachers, the Geographical Association. My
PGCE students were expected to do so and encouraged to go to conference. It has
given me enormous pleasure to see former students, including Mark Higginbottom,
Richard Allaway, Matt Podbury and Emma-Rawlings Smith, giving presentations at GA
conferences."
Since my retirement
in 2006, in addition to my year as GA President (2008-2009), I have continued to
be involved with the GA and with geographical education generally. I
coordinated the GA’s Think Piece project; I edited 'Teaching Geography' journal for a
while and went on well-organised GA Study Tours to China, South Africa, Mexico
and Poland. I chaired COBRIG (Council for British Geography) for six years and
organised its small-scale seminars in Sheffield, Perth and Cardiff. I have contributed
to CPD sessions for Teach First, Prince's Trust, Eduqas and a MAT. I was on the IGU
Commission for Geographical Education British Committee for many years and
contributed to its conferences in Helsinki, South Korea, Brisbane, Melbourne, Stellenbosch,
Singapore and Lisbon. I have been a member of the Geography Education Research
Collective (GERECO). I continue to write
occasional articles and chapters and to contribute to conferences.
My GA publications,
notably, ‘Learning through Enquiry’, led to unimagined further opportunities. I
was invited to run courses for teachers on ‘Inquiry’ in Singapore in 2011, the
Netherlands in 2014 and Hong Kong in 2015. So, although I never did teach abroad,
I did get to travel widely in the end. I developed my second book, 'Geography through
Enquiry' (now translated into Korean), from the ten courses I ran in Singapore. My
unplanned and surprising career would not have developed in the way it has
without my involvement in the Geographical Association. Through the GA I have
met and shared ideas with so many inspirational people and feel very grateful
to have received so much support and encouragement from the GA community."
David Wright, who died on 20 November 2009 after a battle with cancer, was a geographer and author whose work inspired children around the world.
David's obituary on behalf of the Geographical Association was written by Margaret Roberts and published in 'Geography'. It has often been the job of GA Presidents to have that sad duty.
