Humanities 2020 Podcast

The humanities prepare students to be good citizens and help them understand a complicated, interlocking world. The humanities teach us critical thinking, how to analyse arguments and how to imagine life from the point of view of someone unlike yourself.

Martha Nussbaum

It was a pleasure on Wednesday afternoon this week to sit and chat with Anthony Barlow to record a podcast for the Humanities 2020 website and project.

The project has a manifesto.

Primary schools have a duty to equip children for the challenges of the 21st century. We believe that the primary school curriculum in England is failing to do this or to fulfil the legal requirement for a balanced and broadly-based curriculum. Literacy and numeracy dominate the curriculum while other vital aspects of learning are often ignored. This is wrong.

We want young children to be literate and numerate, but much more than that. We affirm that every child is entitled to rich, stimulating and engaging learning experiences.

We want children to have more opportunities to be creative and to build on their sense of curiosity. We would like to bring more joy and imagination back into the classroom.

The podcast I recorded seems to have been the longest to date. Which I guess is a good thing...

You can listen here if you have 55 minutes to spare... thoughts welcome. It was a bit of a ramble at times.

Thanks to Anthony for the invitation.

After I'd recorded it, I also checked out the ACast podcast hosting system which was being used for the Humanities 2020 podcast, and signed up for a free account and created the site for a podcast of my own which I'm going to call 'Living Geography'. 

Look out for the first episode coming when I can find the time to record it.

GetOutside Day

 

I hope you have something planned for today!

Between 2018 and 2020 I worked as a GetOutside Champion for the Ordnance Survey: part of a team of people in various locations around the country encouraging people to get outside in different ways. Some of them were athletes, bloggers, Instagrammers, runners, paralympians and TV personalities. I was just a geography teacher using my blogging and role to encourage fieldwork and other outdoor activities in the curriculum. We added a Fieldwork Week to my Presidential year, with thanks to Paula Richardson for her efforts there, and expanded it to a Fieldwork Fortnight last year.

There is plenty of advice on the Ordnance Survey's page for this day when people are encouraged to spend time outdoors.

And don't forget to follow the Countryside Code.

Less than ideal

 

Guest post: Ice cores reveal Antarctica is warming twice as fast as global average | Mathieu Casado Raphael Héber Amaelle Landais @DaviFaranda

Read here: https://t.co/d6K4cuj1xg pic.twitter.com/wC7AjpBNcC

— Carbon Brief (@CarbonBrief) September 22, 2023

We have a new home...

Mr. P and Miss S have moved into new classrooms over in Bishop Woodford House. 

Some pupils will still have their lessons in the New Block, but we will be in the 'new new' block!

We are enjoying our location and once the construction work going on around us finishes at Christmas time, we will be in an even better location, with easier access to both the Prep School and the Senior School.

I've been setting up my new room over the last few weeks - still a way to go.

More to come on Bishop Woodford himself in a future blog post...

Tutor2U have shared a good set of classroom posters for those who need some display materials.

Stuff...

 

Barbara Iweins is a photographer who spent years working on a project called Katalog.

This is a visual catalogue of all of her possessions.

She didn't just take a photo of them all - every lego brick, every item of clothing, every book - but also considered their origins and the images can be laid out in different combinations. An example can be seen above.

There's a French edition of the Katalog available as a physical book - I'd quite like to see how the project is portrayed in the printed edition.

I won't attempt something quite on that scale, but I think the actual project is worth looking at for a possible student project on capturing images of their own belongings.

OFSTED Subject Report

 Here at King's we are inspected by ISI, but we keep abreast of what OFSTED has to say too....

The long-awaited subject report for Geography has now been published and can be viewed on the OFSTED website.

It's called 'Getting our Bearings'. It applies to England only.

The GA has posted its thoughts on the report on a page on the GA website, from which the report can also be downloaded.

The description of the report below is from the GA website. I have emboldened some key areas.

Ofsted’s finding is based on inspection of the content taught in 50 schools, which was more challenging and representative of the distinctive nature of the subject than seen in earlier reports. The sustained rise in the number of pupils opting for geography GCSE and A level is also welcomed by the report, as is the significant curriculum development work undertaken in recent years by teachers in both the primary and secondary phases.

The report also identifies challenges for geography education. Recruitment of geography teachers is a significant issue, leading to a high prevalence of non-specialist teaching. Ofsted also finds that teachers of geography, specialist or otherwise, receive very little subject-specific professional development. As the GA has proposed on more than one occasion: there is a clear need for a programme of professional development at all key stages, to support the teaching of geography nationally.

The report finds a wide variation in curriculum time between schools, which affects the way the subject is taught and whether ambitious curriculum goals are being realised. Particular concerns are raised about the quality of curriculum planning at GCSE, where exam specification coverage is often prioritised over learning, and the quality of fieldwork provision across all schools, which has not yet recovered from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

There are also personal responses from Alan Kinder and GA President Denise Freeman, which can both be read on the GA website.

Sunny Hunny

I spent the day in Hunstanton in the sun last Friday with 45 Year 4 students and six colleagues from KEP.

This was a good way to spend the day, exploring what makes it a special place.

Image: Alan Parkinson, shared under CC license

Census Data and Centenarians

 

A new visualisation on the ONS website today explores the growth in the number of centenarians flagged up in the latest Census.

There are now almost 14 000 people who are aged over 100.

A few other facts:

Centenarians still only represent 0.2% of the total population.

Male centenarians in 2021 had outlived their life expectancy at birth by four decades and female centenarians by three decades.

Two in five centenarians lived alone; one in five lived in private households with other people; the remaining two in five lived in a communal establishment.

A higher proportion of male centenarians were married than female centenarians; this is because of the longer life expectancy of females and because men, on average, marry women slightly younger than themselves.

Investigate the map yourself here. One of the areas with a higher than average percentage of centenarians is local to me: the North Norfolk coast.

Coastwise in North Norfolk

Handy for our Year 7 scheme and also for Year 4 potentially. 

One of our local papers had a story on a project called Coastwise.

There is more detail on the project here.

A video explaining the scheme, which is described as a coastal transition.

Over the next 100 years, it is predicted that over 1,000 homes will be lost to erosion in North Norfolk. Erosion will impact whole communities by threatening businesses, roads, footpaths, and utilities such as sewage, water and electricity. It will also affect our wellbeing, beach access and heritage assets such as churches, lighthouses, listed buildings, and much more.

The consequences of erosion are profound and require advanced planning to transition to being more prepared. Coastwise will involve working together in North Norfolk to develop nationally useful practical actions, plans and policy, funding and finance options.

Action needs to be taken now to explore how local authorities, communities, individuals, and national government can best work together to prepare and plan for coastal erosion.

The FAQs page here, along with some prepared questions could make a really useful resource for students to interrogate.

There's also a Photobook of examples.

And a film from Hemsby

Cynefin

What is the place you call home? Is it in the UK or outside?

“Cynefin” is a Welsh term defined by Curriculum for Wales as 'the place where we feel we belong, where the people and landscape around us are familiar, and the sights and sounds are reassuringly recognisable.’

Although it can be translated to “habitat” in English, “cynefin” is not just the area in which we live; It is often used to describe the relationship between people and the natural world, and how our connection to our surroundings can shape our sense of identity and well-being.

Cynefin is also used in the broader sense of community, culture, heritage and identity. It is a holistic concept that encompasses the physical, social, cultural, spiritual and economic dimensions of a place, and how these dimensions interact with each other. It is seen as the historic, cultural and social space which is shaped and defined by the community that inhabits it.

UEA: The Stuff of Life Exhibition

This is closely linked to our Year 8 unit on the Geography of Stuff.

A new exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre  at UEA has opened.

The policy as with other recent exhibitions is that visitors pay what they can afford under what they call a Universal Ticket.

The exhibition is called The Stuff of Life / The Life of Stuff.

In this major international exhibition, visitors will meet artworks composed of salvaged materials, resynthesised fragments, and e-waste. They will encounter new environmental zones, where synthetic and organic matter interact, providing a fertile ground for the invention of mythical worlds, dystopias and speculative future narratives.

These hybrid living-art entities have life stories that begin with the histories of the objects from which they have been born, and which tie them intimately to the things that construct our own sense of reality and animate our immediate environments. Through these challenging, empathic, and creative encounters with the artworks, visitors are asked to reimagine their relationship to synthetic materials and commodities designed not-to-last, and consider who is responsible for consumption, over-production, and waste streams in modern society. Ultimately, these artworks demonstrate the ingenuity of human creativity to re-imagine our relationships with the planet and inspire people to positively engage with our shared future.

Gapminder Query

Another year of teaching has started with another run of the latest iteration of our Factfulness scheme of work. We have the book on Audible to play certain sections where Hans outlines the ideas and misconceptions and takes the students through why they perform so badly compared to chimpanzees... which is picked up in Ola's video about the terrible results. Bananas are required for this lesson.

It always makes a great way to start the year.

One of the diagrams that we use is also taken from the book and is shown here.

I pulled it out today to start thinking about the next few lessons and started thinking about the bottom diagram.

Where should the eighth person go?

And are the income level boundaries still the same, or should they have shifted upwards given the increasing cost of services and commodities since the original book was written and published? $32 a day doesn't buy what it used to.

Would be interested in any thoughts on this, and I can then discuss this with students.

Discovering Antarctica refreshed

I received my RGS bulletin a few days ago with news of events leading up to Christmas.

It explained the work that has been going on to refresh one of the sites which I have used every year since it appeared, and also contributed a small section to when it first launched.

Discovering Antarctica has had some new sections added and others refreshed, with the help of Polar scientists.

It remains a real go-to site for us at King's Ely and we will be teaching our Pole to Pole unit again later in the year...

100 000 views

Another small milestone reached this weekend as this blog passes 100 000 views. I started it back in 2013 when I started my new teaching post at King's Ely, so that's around ten years of posts on and off.

New school identity

On return to school when term starts tomorrow, I will be at a 'new school' as we are rebranding to King's Ely Prep from King's Ely Junior. I will be interested to see how quickly all references to Junior disappear.