A Vision for Geography
One of the key areas that you will need to think about is what you value about geography's contribution to learning and what vision you hold for primary geography in your school.
Having a 'vision' for what geography can do for your children is the key to being a subject leader rather than simply a manager. It enables you to shape and design the kind of curriculum that is right for your school and for the children you teach. Furthermore, your collective 'vision' and 'aims' for the curriculum provide you with the tools to monitor how effectively the subject is being taught.
Your starting point may well be a series of questions that you share with staff:
- What do we want geography to do for our children?
- Why is this area of learning important?
- What if we choose to focus on a particular area of geographical learning, for example the 'global dimension' or 'geographical fieldwork'. How would our children benefit from such an approach? What would they lose?
Questions such as these lie at the heart of any curriculum design and delivery.
Taking a different view
A Different View is a manifesto for school geography from the GA, launched in 2009, with the aims of helping the reader to understand 'why geography is so important' and what 'geography in the 21st century' is trying to achieve.
Take a look at these free images and activities which will start you thinking about school geography for the 21st century.
The manifesto was written to meet the needs of each phase of education and as such each phase has been given a separate introduction. If you'd like to find out more, a good place to start is the Early Years & Primary introuduction, which begins with the following quote:
'Informed and active future citizens need to understand how their lives are connected to others and are both shaped by and impact on the environments they inhabit if they are to make responsible choices for the future'.
Activity: Envisioning geography
Having read this document, reflect on the following:
- What messages about geography come across most strongly to you?
- Now think of the geography that you yourself are teaching. How could you change your own teaching in order to embrace two or three of the ideas that are being shared here?
- What three messages would you like to take back to your senior management team?
- How will you share your idea with colleagues?
Three Quality Mark schools share their vision
Geography is a 'big' subject and where geography is taught effectively the school prioritises areas of content and has clear strategies for helping children understand key ideas and develop geographical skills.
We have chosen to exemplify this section with the work of three schools who submitted applications for the award of the Primary Geography Quality Mark. These schools are moving away from the QCA schemes and though they draw on the National Curriculum for guidance they also have the confidence to 'make their own curriculum'.
The following presentation showcases the vision of these three schools. You'll probably need to download the PowerPoint in order to view the smaller text.
Cannot Display Flash Content
The latest version of flash could not be found on your system.
Please download the latest version of flash for your operating system to view this movie.
Flash can be downloaded from the Adobe website Flash area
Activity: Uncovering a school's 'vision' for geography
This presentation illustrates how geography is 'valued' in three schools: Two River's Special School, Methodist J & I and Tithe Barn Primary School. Two of these schools achieved the Gold Primary Geography Quality Mark (PGQM) and one was awarded silver. Having viewed the presentation:
- How does each of these schools see geography contributing to children's learning?
- Try to write a 'vision' statement for each school, possibly using the following sentence stem:
We believe that through geography our children will learn...
Course units
Comment on this page
Comments made by GA members appear instantly - make sure you're logged in! Guest comments will be sent to a moderator for approval.
Current conversations
What our website visitors are talking about.