We'd love some further feedback on the D3 project materials that have been created as part of the project.
Ideally, this would be in the form of a StoryMap which we could add to our gallery of examples. Click the Gallery Tab on the website (link below) to see some existing examples.
Here's a quick resume of what we've produced over on the D3 project website.
A new StoryMap made with the input of Parag Khanna.
I used this resource last week from the Marine Stewardship Council (you may have seen their blue fish 'tick' logo on fish.
It won a GA Award.
We have lost some familiar names that have been around for decades, and this has also led to large and beautiful buildings sitting empty and under threat as they are unlikely to find new tenants in a hurry due to their size and central locations. The report includes stores from national chains such as Debenhams to more local and regional examples. In Norwich, for example, we have the Jarrold's stores which are an important part of the town centre's retail offering.
Many of these buildings could be described as 'cathedrals of commerce' with important architectural value.
Produced by Save Britain's Heritage.
Thanks to this tweet for the tipoff to the report, which is free to download.
Report issued by @SAVEBrit focuses on the crisis facing Britain’s handsome and varied department stores, urging imaginative reuse of our ‘cathedrals of commerce'. Full report here: https://t.co/u6oTeULz5c pic.twitter.com/2bvHg18Dom
— Philip Downer (@frontofstore) April 5, 2022
Printed copies will be available for those who join us face to face in Guildford.
I can't wait to collect one. Thanks to everyone who was involved in
Visit the conference page and download the handbook by clicking the PROGRAMME link.
You can also book your tickets if you haven't already done so. You can see the REMOTE sessions in the handbook too.
I was told yesterday that the AQA GCSE pre-release material for the 2022 summer exam season was based in / or mentioned Ely, so I asked for a copy and discovered that it was based on an application by Amey to add an incinerator to their existing waste management park near Waterbeach / Denny Abbey to the south of Ely, along the A10.
I tried to add some local contexts - newspaper articles, campaign group reports, local landscape character analysis reports etc. into the mix and shared to the community - AQA is the most popular GCSE specification choice so there will be lots of teachers looking to prepare something on this, and we are all working at our limits at the moment with hybrid learning for many still due to students recovering at home from COVID.
Anthony Bennett has added a copy of the document to his page of pre-release materials. This is available to subscribers and non-subscribers of Internet Geography.
An editable version is below or on this link...
Feel free to download a copy and add your own ideas to the document - there have already been some deletions from the document which is a little disappointing, but I have been able to recover to previous versions.
Images: Alan Parkinson and shared under CC license
An interesting piece in 'The Conversation' about the impact of fashion on the planet and the people who create it.
This is a very useful article which will certainly find a place in my Year 8 curriculum library as it nicely unpicks the impact of a shirt, with some useful statistics and detail on the Cambodian garment industry.
Attendees at the GA Conference have a number of pathways which they can follow if they are interested in particular aspects of the subject e.g. GIS.
These are often flagged up with colours in the conference programme.
Chris Winter and Kit Rackley have worked to identify sessions which relate to the theme of decolonial and anti-racist education. I am grateful to them for their time.Delighted that this year’s #decolonisegeography pathway for @The_GA conference is now out. Kindly put together by @geogramblings and Chris Winter, it offers a route through conference for those interested in decolonial and anti-racist education #GAConf22 https://t.co/7QSHUeyRjT
— Decolonising Geography (@DecoloniseGeog) March 17, 2022
There are some very useful sessions which have been identified.
These have been published on the Decolonising Geography website.
A PDF can be downloaded here.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1g2VctmPkLdwRKgzb2dLga5NKRrgplprf/view?usp=sharing
Thanks to a student Izzy for locating this good example of the circular economy in action.
Gerrard Street is a Dutch company that make headphones.
The headphones are of high quality, and once purchased can be repaired for free for a lifetime, with modular part replaced free of charge rather than leading to the need for a new purchase with most headphones once a small issue develops.
The company is used as a case study on the Ellen MacArthur Foundation website.
This is not related to the 1980s TV drama featuring a nuclear bomb being dropped on Sheffield...
Threads is a new online game from the Global Goals Centre, which has had the involvement of a number of organisations.
Thanks to Verity Jones for the tipoff.
The activity explores the product life cycle of an item of clothing, with different routes depending on what the product is, and several other decisions that are taken during the course of the journey... This is revealed at the end.
The book follows Leonard's life, the ups and downs of life in Manchester, school, racism, attacks on his family, but also the kindness of neighbours, a work mate and ultimately finding love.
The book ends with events mirroring the Windrush Scandal - which is still ongoing. I have blogged about the book previously, and my plans to create this unit as part of a range of work around decolonising the curriculum and adding a colonialism lens to topics such as food and globalisation.
For the first teaching of the unit, I was able to get a bargain price on a book for each Year 7 student from Bookpoint.
I put together a 28 page booklet to help guide the reading, along with support from my colleague who teaches both Geography and English. This was printed as a booklet, with an image of a landing card from the Goldsmith's project on the back.
Along with some context and details on the author, there were also spaces for students to jot down key events in each of the chapters along with a factfile on Leonard - the main character.
As the unit has gone through, I have amended the booklet and changed a few of the questions and emphases - there is plenty of reading and further references at the back of the booklet as well.
The recent DfE guidance on political impartiality has added an interesting dimension to the teaching of this unit, as there is inevitably mention of the Home Office destroying landing cards which would have proved citizenship, deporting people without good cause, and the famous vans suggesting to migrants that they should leave - except the Windrush migrants had lived here and paid taxes and paid into pensions, raised families, worked for the NHS and were then treated terribly.
A few extra activities also worked particularly well - my colleague Helen Melville had great success with students writing 'Chapter 33' - what happened next, with some really creative outcomes. I am also preparing to create a new display on the work that we completed based on the book which will offer opportunities for interactivity with those who see it.
In response to requests, here is Version 1 of the booklet that I created. There will be some amendments made to this before I teach it again, with some clarity over some of the tasks.
Thanks to students for their feedback on the module. It will certainly be repeated next year.
We finish our Antarctica unit by exploring the position of tourism in Antarctica and the relative issues and benefits of tens of thousands of visitors arriving in a fragile location, using air or sea travel which is polluting and arguably completely unecessary. The Antarctic Treaty was created in an era when only scientists, explorers and the military were heading that far South, and there was no need to add any specific mentions of tourism to the document or protocols.
This article looks like being an ideal addition to those discussions:
This Conversation research shared earlier by Rob Chambers suggests that every visit to the continentEach Antarctic tourist effectively melts 83 tonnes of snow – new research https://t.co/ZRTvVCEQho via @ConversationUK
— Rob Chambers (@RobGeog) February 23, 2022
