OCR B ‘supports the view that an investigative, issue-based approach should be adopted … and that this should be considered in the context of the inter-relationships between people and the environment’. The content of this specification has four units underpinned by Key Ideas and Key Questions and many of the latter are similar to those in the Pilot GCSE. The possibility of accessing some of them through this specification, further supported by the statement ‘the area to be studied should be carefully chosen so that exemplars are not considered in isolation’.
My Place
Unit 3 ‘People and Place’ relates to much of the Pilot GCSE theme ‘My place’ emphasising the concepts of uneven development, interdependence and futures. You could develop much of the first section of the theme in conjunction with the required ‘Study’ and ‘Cross-unit task’ in order to develop candidates’ personal geographies of the local community. Many of the illustrative content’s suggestions for local investigations of services and planning issues fit well with the second and third sections of the My place theme. The section on Urban-Rural Interaction provides a way into some of the ‘big geographical issues in the UK today’ such as migration and population change.
An Extreme Environment
Unit 1 ‘Climate, the Environment and People’ and Unit 2’s section on ‘the Hydrosphere’ compare well with the content and enquiry sections of the ‘Extreme environment’ theme. As either a starter to the Units or a synopsis at the end, you could draw many of the OCR B Key Ideas together by considering North Africa. If teachers then focus on the Sahara Desert as an example of an extreme environment you could use the Sahel as a small-scale study, the savannah as the ecosystem and the Nile to illustrate the Key Ideas in the Hydrosphere. Turn to pages 25-28 in the Teachers’ Resource Guide for an exemplar of this in action - using the Arctic Ocean and Svalbard Islands.
Alternatively, you can access the Resources section via the navigation bar on the left or visit Unlocking the Archives, where you will find ‘Antarctica’, another example of an extreme environment.
Unit 4 ‘People, Work and Development’ has two sections, namely ‘Economic Activity’ and ‘Development, Trade and Aid’ where many of the content and enquiry questions of ‘People as consumers’, the Pilot GCSE’s third theme, can be explored. Questions considering the spatial impact of both ‘a particular product’ and ‘a named service’ are particularly relevant. These emphasise the consumer’s point of view. The ethics of consumption could be explored under the Key Idea ‘International trade and aid have contributed to contrasting stages of economic development’. An exemplar is provided on pages 29-39 of the Teachers’ Resource Guide.
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Pilot GCSE: Links to OCR B 1987
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