AQA C is an issue-based specification. ‘Twelve contemporary concerns have been selected for investigation and arranged in three sections’. These are ‘Managing Change in the Human Environment’, ‘Managing the Physical Environment’ and ‘Managing Economic Development’. The content is linked to a series of Key Questions. All three provide opportunities for exploring the concepts and themes of the Pilot GCSE.
My Place
Key questions 9.3 and 9.4 in AQA C both lend themselves to introducing much of the ‘My place’ contexts and enquiry questions. All the sub-sections emphasise ‘Fieldwork Opportunities’ so that the community local to the school could act as a suitable starting point to develop the candidate’s understanding about the ‘local place’. Depending on its location, this could lead into either ‘Changing City and Town Centres’ or ‘Pressure at the Rural-Urban Fringe’. This would link with the bigger picture of links within the UK and beyond, as well as the key issues affecting the UK and candidates’ own lives (e.g. push-pull effects and migration). Such an approach would help to emphasise the concepts of uneven development, interdependence, futures and globalisation.
An Extreme Environment
AQA C’s Key Question 9.7 allows the choice of the Sahara Desert as ‘An extreme environment’. The Sahel could be used as ‘a selected smaller example of a typical landscape’ and Egypt chosen in order to look at one of the two alternative strategies required. Teachers would then be able to try out one of the themes from the Pilot Geography specification as well as some of the context ideas and enquiry questions. Teachers might like to look in the Teachers’ Resource Guide (pages 25-28) where the Arctic Ocean and Svalbard Islands are developed as an extreme environment.
People as Consumers
‘People as consumers’ does not sit very easily with the ‘Managing Economic Development’ section. 9.10 resonates partly with the first set of enquiry questions in this theme. The sub-section 9.12 on ‘Tourism and the Economy’ could be used in the context of the holiday industry as the ‘spatial impact of a named service’. It could also be used for accessing the enquiry questions about global interconnections and the rights and responsibilities of consumers in the last two sections.
In this specification many of the enquiry questions in the Pilot GCSE’s themes may prove useful starters for the range of issues to be covered.
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Pilot GCSE: Links to AQA C 3033
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