Geographical Association

Why teach in this way?

The way we think about primary geography is changing and some of the approaches to teaching and learning described earlier support strong links with other curriculum areas. This unit is particularly supportive of citizenship as it is built around the idea of exploring how we 'feel' about our own locality.

Influential thinking on the subject of primary geography is now placing much greater importance on children's everyday geographical experience and on their geographical imaginations, i.e. the geography inside children's heads.

'Everyday geography enables pupils and teachers to recognise that they are already thinking geographically in their everyday lives... This means connecting the knowledge that teachers and pupils bring with them from their daily experience to the knowledge and ways of understanding the world that geographers have developed over the years, sometimes referred to [by other geographers, for example Massey (2005) and Swift (2004)] as the geographical imagination.' (Martin, 2006)

What can we as teachers learn about children's learning through undertaking this kind of mapping activity?

One of my aims for this project has been to try and tap into children's 'geographical imaginations' by providing them with an opportunity to express how they feel about different parts of the school and grounds. Diane Swift, writing for Issue 27 of the Ordnance Survey Mapping News, argues convincingly that we should be using mapping as a means of exploring the personal geographies inside children's heads.

'If this geography remains in the head of the learner, it is an educational opportunity lost. If pupils' geographical imaginations do not find a forum within which they can be shared, developed, refined, critiqued and reviewed, misconceptions may go unchallenged and pupils' learning become restricted in certain ways. The task of the geography teacher is to create the space and time in geography classrooms for the geography in children's heads to be revealed. Using maps and cartography is one medium into which emotions can be poured. Annotating conventional maps or creating the pupils' own maps are purposeful activities. Through these activities the geography in our heads, our emotional geography, is revealed. Once revealed it can be used, analysed and reviewed.' (Swift, 2004)

It was fascinating to gain access to the children's geographical imaginations through the Local Studies mapping activity and to discover how they felt about particular places in the school and grounds. Take this example from one boy (who incidentally had said to me very early on, 'We're not going to write are we?'),

'I call this a battle field because this is where we sometimes have school civil wars. Obviously I feel excited here not just because I'm running around playing with my friends but also because of these mass school civil wars and class civil wars that I am their over watcher the centre or target of the war (the main man that everyone wants to catch) or a part of the war, fighting for my side and I am also known by my friends for tricking the opponents into thinking I'm on their side or moving to their side. That's when I betray my real opponents.' [spelling corrected]

Note also this example from a girl...

'The school field is a great place for summer because it is spaced out and everyone is happy on it.'

How do these different pupils think about the same place? How do they see the space being used? Might a further investigation reveal which parts of the school field are occupied by children who like to play this boisterous 'civil war' game and alternatively which spaces are occupied by those who enjoy quieter pursuits? There is clearly enough space in this particular school for everyone to feel happy. However, if there was constant friction between children on the school field this might prove a useful activity to discover what was going on for the children. This could be followed by constructive action to sort out the difficulty. Used in this way geography has a very real and useful contribution to make in the resolution of a social problem within the school community: this is real geography in action.

Think about other occasions when it would be useful to ask children to map how they feel about a particular place.

Jot down some ideas about when and in what context you might choose to use this idea of creating a map to show how we feel in a particular place. These are sometimes called Think Maps or Messy Maps. See this CPD unit on Think Maps.

How can 'Think Maps' help us to reveal misconceptions?

Two examples of children's misconceptions are illustrated in the scenarios shared here.

The first example I'd like to draw your attention to is illustrated in the image below. In this example the children fail to place the hotspot onto the correct location on the school map. Instead they mark the office in the location which is actually that of the library.

View a larger version of this image

In a second example, which you can view for yourself at Quikmaps, the three boys who created it were mapping their feelings about a wider range of places.

I discovered their error when I was showing the map to another adult. I'd zoomed the map out to give a wider view of the north of England and spotted three more icons beyond the city of Wakefield boundary. These icons all seemed to have something to do with football- no surprise there then.

The first two, Manchester and Huddersfield, were accurately located but why, I asked myself, was there a third icon sitting on the Welsh border that said, 'I feel sad when Liverpool lose'. Perhaps, I reasoned, one of the boys visited a relative here on the way to watching Liverpool play, though it seemed like a long detour.

The reality was somewhat more prosaic. When I managed to talk with the boys and ask them about this icon they said, "Well that's where Anfield is - we looked it up on the map." My first thought was that there must have been another place in this locality called Anfield, but I certainly can't spot it. Can you? So I'm still not too sure what they did.  

What is apparent though is that these children are struggling with locating a particular place accurately. In the first example it was the school office and in the second the much more challenging task of locating Liverpool's Anfield Football Ground.

In the first example the small scale of the map ought to make the task much easier while in the second example the scale of the map makes the task clearly more challenging. So I'm not suggesting that it is always possible to accurately locate places. I spend quite a lot of time geo-locating images on internet photo-sites like Geograph and Flickr and I know there are times when I really struggle to place them accurately, though I do this with an awareness of what the place is like and what I am and am not likely to see in a particular locality. These children had not yet reached this level in their thinking about places. How then, do we help children to gain this awareness? After all, locating places on maps and finding our way around is an essential skill.

Your thoughts

Choose one of these misconceptions linked to the accurate location of place and think how you might help children in your class if they were experiencing a similar difficulty.

You may decide that you need to do some further reading about the development of map-work before you can come up with activities that would help these children to move on. References to further reading are provided below.

Further reading about map-work and how it can be developed

Section 2 of the Primary Geography Handbook - with a focus on enquiry, map-work skills, using images and fieldwork

Primary Geography Handbook Extension Project - Maps and Stories

GTIP Think Piece on Making and Using Maps

Bringing your maps to life: some suggestions (Parkinson, 2009, pp. 26-29)

Emoting with maps (Swift, 2004, pp. 12 -15)

References

Martin, F. (2006) 'Everyday Geography', Primary Geographer, Autumn 2006, pp. 4-7
Swift, D. (2004), 'Emoting with Maps', OS Mapping News, Issue 27, Winter 2004, pp. 12-15
Parkinson, A. (2009) 'Bringing your maps to life: some suggestions', OS Mapping News, Issue 35, Spring 2009, pp. 26 - 29
Massey, D. (2005) For Space. London: Sage

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