My name is Alan Kinder, I am the Chief Executive of the Geographical Association.
Geography as a subject is almost unrecognisable from the one that you
would have seen when the GA was formed in 1893.
The subject has moved from being a gazetteer, a way of trying to cover the
world, towards a subject which seeks to explore and explain the world in
which we live.
It's concerned with the relationship between people and the environment.
It is really providing some of those ideas and thoughts which underpin an
awful lot of learning throughout the curriculum.
I think it's really important.
It gives children a sense of awe and wonder about the world that they live in and
actually, if you think about young children, they intuitively have
that sense of awe and wonder but they don't always know what it's about.
If we teach them good geography, connected and contextualised
within other subjects, then they get to know what it is that there are
actually enjoying and learning about and they want to learn more in
the future.
The new geography national curriculum is a slimmed-down version of what
we've seen before.
It really emphasises the essential knowledge that pupils need to acquire.
There are some things which have an increased emphasis from what
we have seen previously.
Place and locational knowledge, for example, there's a requirement for students
to learn about different regions and places around the world to understand
the importance of their location.
There is a renewed emphasis on what we call process,
both human and physical process and it's really by understanding how those
operate that students then acquire an environmental understanding.
The physical and human working together.
The third emphasises is on procedures, including technical procedures like
map work but also field work. What teachers can expect is
some degree of greater freedom, if they wish to take,
to put those elements together in ways that their children will
find exciting and challenging.
I must admit that at first I was a bit wary.
I think teachers naturally are wary about change.
Once we started looking at it within the context of the
other subjects that we had to do, the themes that we had to cover,
we found it was really a great opportunity to study areas that
previously I had not studied in any depth with the children and
certainly the children had not prepared for it themselves.
We offer all teachers free of charge things through our website.
That might be resources or it might be professional advice and guidance.
We do find that teachers really value that those are
online, free and freely accessible, both for them and for their students.
The other key aspect, as far as the GA is concerned, is that we know that teachers
really value local support.
That is teachers working in networks together
to develop their own ideas, resources and solutions.
Most teachers in the country really should be able to find,
within their own locality, a GA local branch or indeed
a GA Centre of Excellence, which is a school which is able to offer
its support and guidance.
Some people choose simply to correspond with us,
add comments to our website, write into our journal but people
can also become much more actively involved.
That could be through local branch activity, it could be through
one of our national committees or special interest groups,
fieldwork of ICT, secondary education and so forth.
At the highest level we have people who give their time
freely and are involved at the level of trusties and governing body.
The GA is really a network, a national network of people who
choose to give their time and be involved.
The key benefits for teachers becoming a member of the GA
is to become part of the subject community, in other words a national
community that thinks together the things together as to how to
challenge and solve the challenges of teaching geography.
Specifically what teachers and members get is access to our website with a
wealth of resources, the publications that we offer from our handbooks
through to journals and other sources of professional guidance,
through to our local networks, be they GA branches,
Centre of Excellence as well as other services,
be it consultancy, equality marks and so forth.
There is really a whole menu of things that people can participate in.