Hi #geographyteacher and #geoged folks. Pondering something that's been in discussion on twitter - what do you think? In a Future 3/powerful knowledge curriculum what's the value of fieldwork, especially 'close to home'? Isn't field-based enquiry a messy and inefficient teacher?
Why not just teach 'the knowledge'? Is local geographical enquiry too close to everyday knowledge to render its value questionable? If people wouldn't go for enquiry/discovery in the classroom why do it outside the classroom?
A thread for students on understanding hard readings...
Yes, sometimes the reading you've been set is by an academic that's not the best writer.
Sometimes something else is going on - they are writing to a different audience and not filling in all the backstory.
This thread has been promoted by the interview with Judith Butler that is fascinating on many levels: newstatesman.com/international/…
Some people have chimed in to say, 'oh but she's *incomprehensible*...'
'I mean what does this even mean...?' And sure, it's a long sentence with a lot going on packed into a sentence. If I was giving feedback to a student who needs to 'show evidence of understanding' I'd be asking them to slow down and explain and unpack things a lot more.
As the two are tied together, shirking responsibility for the algorithm and its effects is also then shirking responsibility for the children to whom you have a duty if care.
The point is not that the algorithm mutated and so moves beyond our care - but that we are responsible for our creations, including their unintended consequences.
I had thought - from what I had read and heard - that the approach taken to A level grades was a fairly balanced solution to an impossible situation and that the alternatives were worse.
Perhaps I should have known better - I did a PhD on Data, Education and Futures - how data is made about pupils and how this changes the ways that students and teachers think about the future.
For GCSE fieldwork, and questions on experience of fieldwork, removed...
For AS and A Level, requirement to facilitate fieldwork in set days also removed and more flexibility on approach to primary data as for A Level the non-examined assessment remains...
Woah there, before we leap and write off a whole subdiscipline of geography (children's geographies) for me the question is not whether we 'do relevance' but how and not whether we consider a learner's life experience but how. We are always doing both...
...I take that as inevitable. The question for me becomes whether it's done well or badly, and the status and emphasis given to the sources of knowledge and their blend in the classroom and curriculum.
The outside/within distinction looks like a false choice, as so often is adult-centred vs. child-centred. Can't we work towards a rich, deep, relevance-aware curriculum that considers subject, teacher and student - isn't that what the curriculum making model is all about?
Some working #edu thoughts:
'Schooling' in academic writing land is different from learning & education. Schooling works at many levels but especially through techniques of body management with the goal of internalizing this as self-control - the goal: maximal available attention
for learning. Doesn't mean learning will happen but tries to create an environment and amenable 'bodies' in the jargon, for this to happen. Some #TLAC techniques fall into this. The line between power as domination and power as empowering of students is a fine one. For some the
use of the techniques is problematic. Others are concerned with the ends to which the techniques are put. Others stress the context and culture that shift how the techniques are experienced (as dehumanising or vitalising). But 'schooling' has been often been critiqued as a means