Young Geographer of the Year Competition 2023

Around about the time of the GA Conference, the theme of the Royal Geographical Society's Young Geographer of the Year award is revealed. 

The new theme is now revealed.

We always use this competition as a focus for the final month or so of the Summer term, when lessons are often disrupted by trips and other events, and this forms a useful basis for some lovely class work. Students have time to complete their entries over the summer and we then collect them in in September and have an in-school competition judging and then send off the best entries.

The Young Geographer of the Year is the Society’s annual competition which recognises the outstanding work of the next generation of geographers. With its age ranges spanning the primary years to A Level, the competition encourages thoughtful and creative answers to the competition’s theme which is set each year.

The Society encourages schools to run their own in-house competition and then send their top 10 entries into the national competition. The Young Geographer competition has been running for over 20 years and in 2020 over 10,000 young people took part.

The theme for the Young Geographer of the Year competition 2023 is:

A blueprint for the future

The Society invites students from KS2 to KS5 to create their own blueprint for the future. 

They are looking for innovative ideas to address problems in areas such as food production and supply, energy and sustainability, water security, resources, population growth, economic crisis, transport, travel, urbanisation, risk management, trade, environmental management, biodiversity and more. 

Your ideas and recommendations should be forward-thinking, taking into consideration the depth of the problems and the reasons behind them, as well as what can be done to mitigate them. 

Your blueprint for the future could be a design for an eco-city, or a plan to produce and distribute enough food to feed the world. It could be a look at the future of energy and how we can produce enough energy sustainably without harming the environment, or a plan to revolutionise travel and transport in your country or beyond. 

Your plan must be realistic, but we welcome ideas for futuristic strategies and new technologies.

Details of the competition are here.

To get an idea of the standard of entries of last year's winners, head here.

Entering the competition

The competition has four categories.

Key Stage 2 (pupils aged 7-11)

Key Stage 3 (pupils aged 11-14)

Key Stage 4 or GCSE (pupils aged 14-16)

Key Stage 5 or A Level (pupils aged 16-18)

Students should enter the Key Stage category they will be in on 30 June 2023. 

The deadline for receipt of all entries is Monday 2 October 2023 at 5.00pm. 

Entries received after this time will not be accepted. The RGS encourages schools to run an in-house competition and only send their top 10 entries into the national competition. 

All winners and highly commended students will be invited to an Awards Ceremony at the Society in London on Friday 8 December 2023.

The general entry criteria are the same as usual

KS2, KS3 and KS4 students should produce an A3 size poster entry. 

This can be handmade (then submitted electronically using a scanned copy or photograph) or using PowerPoint, Word, Publisher or PDF, etc. KS5 students should produce an Esri Story Map or write an essay – both of which should contain no more than 1,500 words. 

Key Stage 2 criteria: 

Provide your plan for at least one geographical issue, using annotated images, maps or diagrams. 

Key Stage 3 criteria: Provide your plan for at least two or more geographical issues, using annotated images, maps or diagrams. 

Key Stage 4 criteria: Provide your plan for at least three or more geographical issues, using annotated images, maps, diagrams and data. 

Key Stage 5 criteria: Provide your plan for multiple geographical issues, using annotated images, maps, diagrams and data.

Good luck to all those who put together an entry.

Food for free

I've asked my students, following several weeks exploring food production and sustainability to see what foods they can find for free, and consider that there are hundreds of millions of people who have to produce or find their own food.

Richard Mabey wrote a very useful book in this regard, and you can read a good chunk of it (also for free) here.

Foraging is also very much part of some cultures, and even a necessity for many who can not afford to purchase food at all.

Tens of millions of Africans rely on bushmeat.

This has caused issues in the past - the consumption of 'bush meat' being a factor in the outbreaks of Ebola in West Africa, such as the outbreak in 2014.

Eggs - Nuffield Scholar report

I was recently completing a resource and doing some additional reading around the production of eggs: bringing an earlier PPT up to date.

I discovered the Nuffield Scholarship scheme for those involved in farming, which funds travel and investigation to aid foor production.

Nuffield funds a number of scholars each year who do research and share it back in some way for wider dissemination. They write reports. This report is by Hannah Easthaugh.

(PDF download)

There were some interesting facts in the synopsis of the full report.

Average retail prices decreased from £3.14/dozen in 2007 to £1.30/dozen in 2018 and have now crept up again.

It shows how we have got used to food being cheap, and that the recent increases, which are the result of a great many different factors are going to cause an issue for many consumers who are being hit by other price rises and inflation, along with wages failing to keep pace with the changing costs.

Image: Alan Parkinson, shared under CC license

End of an Era(smus)...

As mentioned in a recent post, I visited Bucharest a few months ago for what may be my final transnational meeting as part of an ERASMUS funded project, representing my school. I have also contributed to the final report for what is very likely to be my final ERASMUS project, and which is being signed off this week.

ERASMUS was one of the (many, many) casualties of the catastrophic decision to leave the European Union. 

ERASMUS has offered me the chance to travel and work with colleagues across Europe since 2010 when I first got involved, thanks to Karl Donert.

I have worked on a number of projects over the years, on projects which received millions of pounds worth of funding. These have offered the chance for students at my school to visit other countries and connect with students in very different circumstances and work on collaborative projects over an extended period of time which have developed their own social and other skills.

DigitalEarth - a major European network - working on one of the SIGs (Special Interest Groups) - this was the most widespread of all the projects and a great place to start. It meant working with a large group of teachers, not all geographers.

I-USE

GI Learner

Developing Digital Data Literacy (D3)

GI Pedagogy

I have also led several events for AENIE: an organisation in Portugal that organises a lot of vocational training courses for teachers and young people from around Europe. I hope to work with Jaime and Ligia again in the future.

Over the years, I have worked with hundreds of educators: academics, teachers, NGOs, project managers, and people from a wide range of European organisations from numerous universities and schools. I have worked on behalf of the Geographical Association, University College London and King's Ely as well as myself.

The projects have mostly had opportunities for travel and spending time in cities around the meetings and extensive work to create the intellectual outputs - writing, reviewing, creating and collaborating on all sorts of documents and training courses, many of which are still free to view on the EuroGeography website of EUROGEO.

I have had the chance to learn from so many expert geographers and people with other subject specialisms, including organisations with specific skills. Quite a few have developed my use of tools such as GIS, and the work has percolated down into my classroom teaching and curriculum making.

It has allowed me access to events I would not normally have attended, including events for geography educators such as the EuroGeo conference, and the GI Forum in Salzburg. 

That included a memorable night as dusk fell over Hohensalzburg Castle.

Image: Alan Parkinson, shared under CC license.

I have had the chance to celebrate and experience the cultures of many new cities and take thousands of images.

There have been many memorable moments during that time, and I regularly see the daily memories on Facebook reminded me that 3,4,5,6 etc. years ago I was in some European city attending a partner meeting.

Ten memories from many:

- sailing on a Silja line ship down an ice-clogged Baltic from Helsinki to Stockholm

- drinking hot chocolate and eating apple strudel in the Hochalm mountain-top cafe on the Untersberg, above Salzburg

- drinking a Mythos in a rooftop bar in Athens, with a sundowner view towards Mount Lycabettus 

- walking on the frozen Wörthersee in Klagenfurt as the sun set over the ice

- retracing the filming locations from In Bruges in Bruges after watching the Procession of the Holy Blood

- meeting at El Pilar, and seeing the amazing science classroom-cum museum, and attending the ESRI User Conference for Spain in Madrid

- walking the cobbled boulevards of Iasi, Romania in the sunshine

- a meal at the Stiftskeller in St. Peter's Abbey in Salzburg, apparrently the oldest restaurant in Europe or the World depending on what you read, and discovering a gathering in the baroque hall upstairs with hundreds of people in dirndls and traditional dress dancing

- visiting a vocational college in Villach in Carinthia near the Slovenian border

- a meeting on the UNESCO listed Finnish fortress island of Suomenlinna, in an old gunpowder magazine

Image: Alan Parkinson, shared under CC license

Do as Hypnocat says...

...and recycle your electricals...

Sustainable foods of the future

More useful videos for the Year 7 Food for Thought topic.

Are insects the food of the future?

A good question.

Eat the meat

Plant based diets...

 

GA Conference Bookclub session

The first of what may become an annual book club event is going to take place on the first day of the GA Conference in a month's time. This is part of the changes to the format of the first day, which includes the fact that the conference dinner is included in the delegate fees.

I have been asked to lead a discussion around a book and provide some thoughts on how it could be used in the classroom. There will also be an opportunity for you to swap books once again as we repeat the book swap which was originally the idea of Kate Stockings and seemed to work well last year, with many people going away with a new read for the journey home.

The book that has been chosen for this first session is:

 'The Edge of the Plain' by James Crawford.

You can follow James on Twitter here.

On a day when Suella Braverman is in Rwanda touring the places where asylum seekers may be housed, when we have a growing rhetoric of exclusion, and a week after the furore over Gary Lineker's comments which led to the BBC being put under pressure, it shows the borders are just as topical as ever. Next month will also see the launch of the new Tim Marshall book. There are over 100 million displaced people globally, and the coming decades will see millions on the move...

You can read the first 50+ pages of the book on Google Books using the link here.

The book is also available to purchase (no obligation to do that) - currently in hardback, but with a paperback version later this year. 

There is also an Audible version of the book, read by James himself, which you may find a useful departmental resource as well. I have a copy for that purpose.

The book has a number of case studies which would be of relevance for many different school contexts and different key stages. They include: 

- Sápmi - the territory of the Sámi people, and the threats of HEP schemes and climate change, and the fight for the cultural identity of the people

- the development of 'no-man's land' during conflicts including World War One.

- Historical walls including those marking the edge of Empires such as the Roman

- The Mason-Dixon line

- how melting glaciers have changed some borders, and also revealed the body of Ötzi the Ice Man, who I have a particular connection with (some good second hand prices to be had)

- the issues facing people crossing from Mexico into the USA, and the project which maps the belongings they leave behind when they often tragically fail to complete the crossing of the desert

- the West Bank and Israel and Palestinian walls behind which lies Banksy's Walled Off Hotel, which James visits - this connects with a unit I used to teach on Israel & Palestine

- the Moroccan border territory of Melilla, which is an entry point into the EU potentially, but is guarded by razor wire, which the Haragas are desperate to cross

- the movement of viruses across borders... 

- the African Great Green Wall to stop desertification

James has also recorded a number of podcasts and interviews which you could watch ahead of the session and they are referenced in the talk as well.

The session will run from 12.30 - 1.30 on the opening day of the conference. I will provide a short input with some ideas for how to use the book, and share some thoughts on other border options. There will then be prompts for discussions and sharing.

There will also be a small input from James himself.

There are other border related books of course including Cal Flyn's book on abandoned places, and Klaus Dodds' 'Border Wars', which is excellent. Tim Marshall's books have also touched on the notion of borders.

Klaus in fact tweeted earlier this morning about the growing relevance of borders...

All of this seems to have taken on added salience in recent days. In my book Border Wars I reflected on four strategies of many governments. Construction, expansion, deflection and expulsion. #borders pic.twitter.com/rYkJs9MMIC

— Klaus Dodds (@klausdodds) March 19, 2023

There's also a relevant piece in today's Observer about the language of stopping the boats...

 

I will also be mentioning an article in 'Teaching Geography' written by my friend and colleague Claire Kyndt, published in 2015, describing our work on a unit on Borders for Year 8 and 9 students. This includes a useful framework for exploring borders which I will be sharing.

It would be lovely to see plenty of people there to start off what I'm sure will be a wonderful conference.

Using the new Census 2021 mapping - a student guide

 

Thanks to Ahmad Barclay for the heads-up (once again) on ONS data and map releases from the Census 2021.

📈Big new data release today on #CensusMaps!📉
See how your area has changed over the past 10 years, right down to a neighbourhood levelhttps://t.co/mIj0ahCHBd
1/3 pic.twitter.com/RiBEdwmq9E

— Ahmad Barclay (@bothness) March 7, 2023

These maps are going to be very helpful for a lot of teachers and students. 

I put a quick guide together which you are welcome to use / download / distribute: 

Census data and maps are shared under an Open Government License.

Plastic recycling investigation

A good story from Reuters which focusses on another project where GPS tags have been used to identify the truth about the movements of items. This time round it was trainers.

Where are the Jamaicans in England and Wales?

Following our work on 'Windrush Child', the new Census 2021 maps from ONS may help answer that question: 

High Rise Pigs

This article in a recent Guardian newspaper describes the move towards intensive pig production in China which has resulted in a multi-storey pig farm.

This is partly driven by the huge demand for pork in China, which consumes almost half the world's pork, with a high per capita consuption.

This is just one of many food related stories that we are exploring at the moment. 

More to come over the next week or so when I share a few bits I've made.

Leonard Parkinson of the Maroons

 

The last half term has seen the second running through with Year 7 of our reading of 'Windrush Child' by Benjamin Zephaniah.

The British Library has a piece which explores a little more about the history of the area around Maroon Town.

Slavery made a huge impact on much of the world, and continues to do so through the legacy of colonialism and the campaign for proper reparations. Many landowners in the UK 

Maroon Town is an important place in the book. It is where the main character in the book was born and where the spirit of 'Nanny of the Maroons' who is featured on a Jamaican banknote. I came across this image of Leonard Parkinson, who was one of the Maroon freedom fighters. 

The main character in the book is called Leonard (we don't find out his surname), but it would be interesting to know whether he was named after this person.

Source: http://www.slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/item/1227

If you haven't seen this UCL map before, this is also an important resource for exploring local connections with the slave trade.

It's produced by the Centre for the Study of Legacies of British Slavery.

GI Pedagogy MOOC - check it out

We are now coming to the final stage of the GI Pedagogy project.

The target audience is wide and you may be part of it...

The project’s outputs and events are aimed specifically at supporting educators (Horizontal Priority: Supporting Educators). 

This training will help teachers embed GIS within their curriculum. 

It will support them to feel confident in teaching GIS as a fundamental tool for modern geography, not as a superficial add-on to existing methods.

The training takes the form of a MOOC: an online course basically, with resources, videos and presentations.

King's Ely is a partner in this project.

Feel free to check it out.

Also feel free to follow us on Twitter @GIPedagogy.