GA Governing Body vacancies for September 2023

After four years as a trustee as part of my Presidential journey through the GA, my term in office comes to an end at the end of August 2023.

At the same time, there is also the end of a term of office for several other GA colleagues who I have worked with for the last four years. This means that there some vacancies on the GA's Governing Body, which is of course a good training ground for those who may have ambitions to become more involved with the Association and give back to the association.

There are actually four vacancies to be filled, which carry different responsibilities.

You can read more about them on the GA website page, and the links here.

Chair of Trustees

Honorary Treasurer

Elected Trustees

Co-opted trustee

For those who may have previously suggested that the GA and its Governing Body needs to become more inclusive and diverse, this is your opportunity!

Happy to answer any questions about the roles and the wider work of the GA's Governing Body if anyone is interested in finding out more.

I will blog my thanks to some of those people who are leaving GB later in the year...

RSGS: supporting Scottish Geography

 

The Royal Scottish Geographical Society (RSGS), along with the Scottish Association of Geography Teachers (SAGT) has been concerned for a while about a number of factors which are threatening the condition of geography in Scottish schools. 

Recently, the two organisations held a meeting at Dollar Academy, Stirling and invited Alan Kinder and others to do short presentation. I have previously shared the YouTube channel 

The key messages are also included in a report which has been made available as a PDF download.

Access the full report here 👉 https://t.co/LqxYiWTSkH pic.twitter.com/nOhYXSDy3m

— RSGS (@RoyalScotGeoSoc) April 18, 2023 

GI Pedagogy Training Course - Madrid - 4th-6th July

Last week I had a meeting of the GI Pedagogy group of partners - which is funded by an ERASMUS+ grant, given by the British Council.

We have been working on resources and an online teacher training course. 

We now have an opportunity for you to join us for a face to face event in Madrid.

Free training course for secondary teachers - introducing an Innovative Pedagogical Model for Teaching using GIS, July 4-6 2022, Madrid, @GIPedagogy project, some travel grants available - find out more and register at https://t.co/8uy2lRNfpA

— karl_donert (@karldonert) May 19, 2022

The Registration form is here, and you can also request a first-come first-served grant of €200 to help with the cost of attending if you are outside of Spain.

It would be great to have you there. Happy to answer any further questions as well. 

AQA Pre-release 2022

I was told yesterday that the AQA GCSE pre-release material for the 2022 summer exam season was based in / or mentioned Ely, so I asked for a copy and discovered that it was based on an application by Amey to add an incinerator to their existing waste management park near Waterbeach / Denny Abbey to the south of Ely, along the A10.

The scheme was controversial, although the benefits were clearly stated by the company. A protest group was set up, and commissioned a report on the impact of the proposal, which included mention of the chimney which would be taller than Ely Cathedral and spoil the view towards it from Madingley (a place of geographical significance).

Interestingly, for a pre-release where students usually have to weigh up whether a planned development should go ahead, the decision has already been made in that the scheme was .... spoiler alert.... turned down in 2020.

I tried to add some local contexts - newspaper articles, campaign group reports, local landscape character analysis reports etc. into the mix and shared to the community - AQA is the most popular GCSE specification choice so there will be lots of teachers looking to prepare something on this, and we are all working at our limits at the moment with hybrid learning for many still due to students recovering at home from COVID.

Anthony Bennett has added a copy of the document to his page of pre-release materials. This is available to subscribers and non-subscribers of Internet Geography.

An editable version is below or on this link...

Feel free to download a copy and add your own ideas to the document - there have already been some deletions from the document which is a little disappointing, but I have been able to recover to previous versions.

Images: Alan Parkinson and shared under CC license

400 posts

This is one of my lesser fringe blogs, but always good to reach a bit of a milestone. Thanks for reading. If you're visiting here for the first time, please check out my main blog over at LivingGeography - you've got a lot to catch up on.

Threads

This is not related to the 1980s TV drama featuring a nuclear bomb being dropped on Sheffield...

Threads is a new online game from the Global Goals Centre, which has had the involvement of a number of organisations.

Thanks to Verity Jones for the tipoff.

Go here to play the game.

The activity explores the product life cycle of an item of clothing, with different routes depending on what the product is, and several other decisions that are taken during the course of the journey... This is revealed at the end.

Usefully, the team has also created a set of lesson plans which are helpful for those in KS2 and KS3, and with a strong cross-curricular / Global Goals theme. There are 8 lessons, each with a PPT and an accompanying overview document.

Here are the details of the team that created the game and accompanying resources.

This is well worth taking a look at, as there might be something here that can slot nicely into, or alongside existing curriculum content and activities.

People behind the statistics

A useful and timely post from Catherine Owen (given the recent eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano).

Image: Catherine Owen

It looks at the way that teachers use statistics following disasters, and how that might be developed to ensure that the actual people involved are not forgotten.

Catherine refers to a video in the post, and that can be found on the Encounter Edu website along with some teaching materials.

Here's the original tweet as well - Catherine asks for your own ideas on what you could do to share your stories of the people behind the statistics, so please get in touch if you have some.

NEW BLOG: The people behind the statistics. I would love to hear how you have shared stories of the people behind the statistics with your students. @NFUEducation @jfpayne @TheFloodHub https://t.co/18h7exj5Hg #geographyteacher

— Catherine Owen (@GeogMum) January 16, 2022