GA Summer Schools

While in the archive, I found a few boxes of folders of materials linked with the GA's involvement in Summer Schools.

These were held in the Summer (naturally) as an additional event at a time when the GA's main Annual conference took place over the New Year period. There were also Spring Conferences for some time.

They involved a great many of the 'great and the good' including academics and teachers. They were abandoned in the 1940s, and revived for a while in the 1950s and 1960s with many international locations for these courses which ran for 2 or 3 weeks and included travel.

Here's a description of one from 1949 in 'Geography'.

When I next head for Solly Street, my plan is to dig out the box and look at some of these events that happened in interesting locations and find out who was involved.

Source

British Geography: edited by Robert Steel (PDF download)

Geography in the Long Vacation

An excellent blog post from the Bodleian Libraries account is helpful for providing some further information on the summer schools that were organised by Frances and A J Herbertson in the early days of the Oxford University geography department.

They were particularly influential and drew on the expertise of other geography educators as well as helping the next generation of geography educators with their innovative ideas. As the blog says:

The summer vacation courses were designed chiefly for schoolteachers. Held to coincide with the school holidays, they were open to anyone. Those attending spent a couple of weeks in Oxford during August for a special course of lectures and practical work in geography. The courses included field trips (for surveying and map drawing) as well as excursions to local places of geographical interest.

1966: Puerto Rico

In 1966, W G V Balchin and Alice Coleman led a GA Summer School in Puerto Rico.

There was an article in 'Geography' in 1965 describing the island written by the two authors.



Perhaps it's time we went back to Puerto Rico.

References

BALGHIN, W. G. V., and A. COLEMAN. “Puerto Rico.” Geography, vol. 50, no. 3, 1965, pp. 274–286. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40567047