GA 2024 - Teaching 21st century competencies and geography

I had just returned from Manchester having attended the Geographical Association Annual Conference and Exhibition (GAACE). There were many insights shared by respected geographers and geography educators at the conference and I would like to share some here, which are helpful in shaping my thoughts on what and how might I move ahead with professional learning for self and others. 

Develop a set of beliefs, principles and provocations as a geography educator

While there were separate keynotes by Professors James Esson and Margaret Roberts and the presidential address by Denise Freeman, they finally appeared to coalesce into a meaningful whole for me. Esson and Roberts contextalised the future of our living world by emphasising the necessity to “decolonise geography”, to promote a geography with a “diversity of voices” while Freeman invited us to think about our “lived experiences” and how our personal context shaped the way we teach. 

To illustrate this further, Roberts’ titled her sharing as “Geographical questions for all? From all?” invoked us to think about questions about equity and access. Questions of ,“Who gets what, where and how?”, “What ought to be done” and “Why should we care?”are deeply philosophical yet, are the kind that our students are made to answer in their “O” and “A” level examinations. Instead of simply relegating them to answering frames or model essays to be memorised, these are fundamental questions of geographical conscience that we should be asking ourselves, as we go about in our daily lives. 

Similarly, Esson was asked by a participant what was a “growth moment” for him as a geographer. He candidly shared about his realisation that one of his uncle was gay and the difficulty he faced in accepting that in Ghana. When he realised the "situatedness" of himself as an individual in a societal and geographical context, it was particularly pertinent and liberating.As geography teachers, our craft and very being is constantly being shaped and reshaped by space and time in our society. How do we even make sense of this, he questioned.

I then recall reading a module on “Development of Geographic Thought” taught by professor Brenda Yeoh about two-and-a-half decades ago. We learnt about the paradigm shifts of geography that happened through the centuries from Humboldt to Haggett. The advantage of these vantage points are that they provide us with a good grounding to understand the motivations of thought, which I believe geography educators should develop in order to be a better teacher. Thus, I was challenged to think more deeply about my subject once again. How has geography shaped the way I think and behave as a person? 

This question may sound a little obvious, until we realise that among geography teachers and geographers, there appears to be a psychic connection between us. Whether it be methods of practice (like our undying love for the outdoors and fieldwork), the way we see the world (through the various social, environmental and economic lenses or theories, pun) or our bias towards environmental action and sustainability. How do we tap on these as a unifying identity to push ahead in this new post-covid world?

It came as no surprise therefore, we geography educators have a strong sense of beliefs, principles and provocations that can be leveraged to come together to inspire the next generation of geographers. The question of how to do it should never rest solely on the shoulders of the prescribed national curriculum. It is unfair that experiencing geography is limited to assigned curricular time only. How can we consider provisions beyond the prescribed curriculum to move ahead?   

Teaching about and for the future

In MOE lingo, we often use the term “teaching and learning” to describe the curricular, pedagogical and assessment processes that a teacher conducts in and outside the classroom. There is also a tendency to use “learn”, as we emphasise pedagogical procedures that cater to diverse learners through understanding their motivations and needs. The focus on “teach” in GAACE underscores the critical role of the teacher in shaping the enacted curriculum through his/her thoughts about the subject, deliberately influencing his/her students for a desired future. 

While as a fraternity, we are persuaded and are convinced of the need to teach 21^st century competencies in our geography curriculum, how we might do it will vary from teacher to teacher. Here are some questions to consider:

• What are the core beliefs that shape me as a person?
• How do these beliefs play out in my daily life and interactions with people and the environment?
• How might I convey these geographically to my students, so that they too, use the subject lens to navigate the world? 

These are questions I seldom ask myself as I go about dutifully delivering the prescribed curriculum, yet they sit squarely within my purview if I were to claim to “mould the future of Singapore”. With our renewed emphasis on 21cc, it is even more pertinent now. Therefore, I would challenge myself to find touch points in the curriculum that resonate strongly with me, think of examples which I can use as “teachable moments” for my students and pedagogies that are suitable for them in their contexts. 

In a gist, teaching for the future is more than just layering technological tools or using AI. We need to examine how geography (or any other subject for that matter) has shaped our identity, values and beliefs, think about how our thoughts and geography might help students navigate the world and their future, and how we could do it in a pedagogically sound manner. In failing to do this, we might just lose focus of teaching about the future and for the future. Instead, we end up merely teaching and using seemingly futuristic tools (which would be superseded by a newer release in a fortnight). We all could see this already happening. We need to dig deep into fundamentals and not end up chasing the latest release in GenAI, in an attempt to fulfil what we is deemed as “teaching about and for the future”.

Conversations, reflections and audit

In professional development, we value teachers’ voices and their reflection. We believe that these two ingredients, coupled with healthy support from a community would be key to growth. I gained an insight as I attended a concurrent session by Dr Rebecca Kitchen who shared about personal content audit. Because I went into the room late, I was stumped by the question she posted on the board “When was the last time you did a (subject) content audit?”. While this term “audit” sounded foreign to me, I recall that I had completed a portfolio for submission to become a master teacher (does that count as an audit?). 

Interestingly, an audit is not a requirement in Singapore. Annual lesson observations (conducted by reporting officers for the purposes of development and to a lesser extent, appraisal for some) is the norm. But is this serving the purpose of an audit? 

Instead, curriculum and pedagogical leaders in the department may encourage teachers to do an audit when a teacher is switching between different levels of teaching, or switching between teaching new groups of students, e.g. G2 to G3 or from G2 to G1. We can also consider an audit when we are teaching new topics in the curriculum as a team of teachers so that we are aware of existing fund of internal knowledge “within us” as teachers. We might be less fixated on physical resources “out there”. While I am not dismissing the importance of quality resources, I am suggesting that we look within first – what are our beliefs, values and identity that can be used to teach a particular unit? What about the funds of networks we can tap upon?

In the figure below, Kitchen shares the different aspects of an audit.

It helps too, if we are aware of the pitfalls before doing an audit. We should also be truly convinced of its effectiveness. If it were to be a mere paper exercise, we might be better off doing one. So, some questions that we might ask are:

• Do we have a strong culture of trust in the department?
• Do we agree that the audit is done is good faith, without the fear of being judged or appraised?
• Are we aware of resources to help us plug the gaps? Are we willing to use them? 

Conclusion

The geography chapter at AST has identified teacher identity and values to be the core of what we teach. We have evolved from the “tiered birthday cake” framework, to the internal structure of the earth framework this year, highlighting that the driving forces of pedagogies originate from the subject identity we have as teachers. In essence, it presents a tighter integration between "what and how we do" to the "why we do what we do".

To uncover identity, values and beliefs we have as geography educators, we need to:

• think and talk about them in the context of our changing and future worlds,
• understand our interactions with society and the environment,
• develop convincing pedagogies and examples to teach them to our students, and
• keep a handle on our content knowledge within a community of practitioners. 

The catch phrase “Teach It, Live It” sums it up neatly for us as we move ahead with new imperatives and new hope for a better tomorrow.

Reference:

GAACE 2024 Delegates Handbook, GA, pg 38

GA2024 - Field visit: Changing landscape of student housing

Introduction

By a twist of fate, I ended up with a field visit to understand the various student accommodation offered at the universities of Manchester (UM) and the Metropolitan Manchester (MMU). While I wasn’t too excited about it initially, what proved to be a “walk in the park” type of visit, demonstrated layers of complexity – competing urban development, citizen voices and the inevitable forces of economics. This field visit inspired me to consider weaving in narratives to our human geography topics in our geography curriculum, to bring out enduring concepts that makes geography a subject for everyone (more on this in a later post).

The University of Manchester (UM) has a long history of 200 years. Founded in 1824, it remains the seat of academic learning. MMU started out as a polytechnic and was later upgraded to a university specialising in vocational courses. Hence MU has a longer history in offering on-site student accommodation to local and international students among residential housing neighbourhoods that surround it. This is where the story gets going.

 

The MU housing story

MU owned parcels of land on its extensive campus where it provided university-controlled student accommodation. This is similar to universities in Singapore where we have the not so imaginatively numbered halls in NTU, to the those in NUS whose hall names are steeped in Singapore’s political history (such as Raffles and Sheares). What caused MU to cease providing large scale university-controlled student accommodation was because there were rent-strikes by students. Yes, you heard it right, rent strikes! These frequent strikes put MU in a difficult position – to provide housing to their students at the expense of losing a source of income. To demand that these vacate their premise ran contrary to their philosophy of students’ welfare.

 

To make things simpler, the idea of inviting private developers to raise blocks of private-built student accommodation (PBSA) was hence mooted. In the photographs below, it is clear that PBSA is the accommodation of choice for students at MU - modern plumbing, efficient heating and cooling, and a more conducive and secure environment for the students. The story would have ended here. Simple, just put everyone into PBSA, and tear down the old MU-owned accommodation.

Photo 1 - MU provided student accommodation is old and run-down.

 

Photo 2 - In contrast, PBSA are new and attractive (at much higher rental costs too)

Because this story happened in the context of existing residential neighbourhoods around MU, it was far from simple. When the demand of student accommodation went up, existing house owners in the neighbourhood decided to rent out their century-old housing stock to students. With this new “entrant” into the scene for student accommodation, things got messy. There were no longer controls over who, when, where and what were rented to students of MU. It became a free market of sorts. Often, unscrupulous landlords would sub-divide their units into smaller ones with the hope of making a windfall in rental. More enterprising ones even bought up an entire street of houses, converting them into cramped student spaces to rake in more money. Displacement and discontent followed. Existing residents had their arms up in the air, with the increased noise, litter and unauthorized sub-standard extensions. These changed the entire feel and culture of the neighbourhoods. We witnessed this physical change of housing stock within a 300 m stretch along Denmark Road and its side streets such as Acomb Street (photo 3).  

Photo 3 - These are century-old housing stock that is sub-divided and rented out to students

 

Because of PBSA being the more expensive accommodation option setting the bar, local landlords of these century-old workers’ houses also raised their rents, pricing local MU students out of the student accommodation market. This further led to sub-divisions of housing units for students to rent. As a result, the situation got so bad that many were paying over-priced accommodation in rather squalid conditions. 

 

Role of citizen advocacy

This story also showcased the strong community advocacy efforts of the local residents that live in the vicinity of MU and MMU. Due to the strong demand of PBSA, developers have been buying up land parcels within the neighbourhoods to build more and more PBSAs. The PBSAs are often multi-storied behemoths, dwarfing the local state-built housing stock. Old places were bulldozed and replaced with shiny glass and brick clad structures, whose inhabitants are ephemeral. Students come and go within years and lack the rootedness of local residents who have spent their entire life times living in these neighbourhoods.

 

Along the field visit, we were shown strong citizen action that opposed the building of a PBSA on a run-down pub site (photo 4) at Boundary Lane. Tis site has been the hot button issue for many residents who have lived their entire lives here, and many are in the 70s or older. There were fiery confrontations and contestations which resulted in a “block the block” movement by the locals (photo 5). Interestingly, a resident queried our field visit facilitator from her third level apartment if he was bringing buyers (all of us on the field visit) around the neighbourhood to shop for land. This clearly showed the tremendous involvement of the locals in resisting an inevitable economic process and an urban eventuality.

 

Photo 4 - The pub site which has temporarily turned into a carpark lot (the pub is the building in white)

Photo 5 - Evidence of resistance in the community 

The negotiation with local authorities did not always end up in a stalemate. We crossed the Epping Walk Bridge to enter MMU territory to reach what our field visit facilitator termed the boundary line between the universities’ zone and the inner-city zone at Old Birley Street. Down there, we saw how positive citizen effort and authorities’ willingness to listen resulted in a win-win for both parties. Community sensitive housing design that allow residents to interact above the street level, inclusion of local businesses, and the conversion of what was originally going to be a car parking facility into a community garden centre complete with a café can be found here, all demonstrating a possible urban solution. 

Photo 6 - Win-win community sensitive housing design that features suspended walkways that allow residents to interact, and locating local businesses at the ground level.

Photo 7 - The Hulme Community Garden Centre

 

What I learnt

 

Often, the world around us may be presented to our students as an unproblematic objective one. We study solutions that are couched in scientific and engineering terms. What human geography is and should uncover, is the humanistic angle of our world. Situating the MU student accommodation in a theme of “controversial development” offers to me an opportunity to learn about facts through real-life stories. How many of us Geography teachers are sensitive to the disciplinary lens Geography offers? How might we tap on these lenses to help our students understand the complexity of urban development, the importance of citizen voices and choices? How do we contextualise these conflicting perspectives in the wider world of policies and economics? 

 

If we do not appreciate these useful nexuses of connections as Geography teachers, we risk missing out the immense potential of this powerful subject in helping our students navigate their future. Unpacking 21^st century competencies alongside the geography curriculum, taking advantage of community stories as learning resources and linking them back to the broader goals of a geography education is a direction that we need to seriously consider if we were to nurture a generation of geographically literate and sensitive youths. Are we ready for this challenge?  

 

 

 

To unlock 21CC we need powerful disciplinary knowledge

 

Today, two of our committed teacher leaders kick-started a new round of networked learning with on “designing learning experiences for deep learning and 21st century skills”. As their advisor, I was invited to helm an opening discussion with the members. About nine teachers from schools in the west zone turned up. Instead of delivering the usual opening address, I decided to dive into these teachers’ understanding of “deep learning”, “What’s worth learning in geography?” and, “Why is it important to teach it well?”.

Geography teachers in Singapore generally are aware what deep learning is not. So my first question did not stump anyone. Responses such as “learning for the sake of exams”, “rote learning”, “completing the syllabus”, “superficial understanding” and “memorisation” popped up. All well and good.

I moved onto the second question. “Imagine you have a magic wand to change all these learning (referring to their earlier input) into something else, what would they look like now?” Also not a difficult question. Most geography teachers are acquainted with Inquiry-based Learning which was introduced to the humanities curriculum more than a decade ago. So you guessed it, phrases like “collaborative learning”, “applying their knowledge”, “meaningful learning with real-life application” and “students understand concept” were listed. There were two counts of “understanding concepts” being mentioned, so kudos to my MTT colleagues in the Geography Chapter for raising the bar in the last five years.

Next challenge was ok too. “What is the value proposition of Geography?”, a question that we geography teachers often ask ourselves as student enrolment declined and students choosing other humanities subjects to study instead. Responses include, “so that students can understand the interaction between the human and physical environments” (Hmm, A-grade textbook response). “To understand how the earth works and do our part to conserve our environment”, “an authentic understanding of the world”, “to see, think and live sustainability”. This is the new rhetoric as mother earth is at the brink of collapse.

The real challenge came when I invited participants to string together their responses to the third question with the second. And after that, they would come up with a joiner phrase “so that … …”. The aim is for teachers to articulate the purpose of studying Geography in a certain way, for a broader purpose. For example, “Students gain an authentic understanding of the world (purpose) through collaboratively learning from one another (pedagogy) so that they can appreciate the fact that youths have different perspectives of their environment and the world (bigger purpose of geography education).”

Why would I be mentioning this in this blog? In our new policy effort to strengthen the delivery of 21st century competencies (21CC) and outcomes, geography teachers must not forget the value our discipline brings to the table. It is easy to bin some substantive knowledge as we struggle with having sufficient curriculum time to teach them; it is also not difficult to tag the 21st century competencies to specific topics, albeit superficially. The bigger question is, how do we convince teachers to apply themselves to the teaching of 21CC so that the educative purpose of our discipline is not lost?

To find an answer to this, I referred to Geographical Association’s (GA) paper on the description of threefuture scenarios (Young and Muller, 2010).

Future 1 is a traditional, fact-based curriculum in which the teacher “delivers” the prescribed content of “core knowledge”. (That’s what our teachers in the NLC say “don’t do”)

Future 2 is a constructivist approach with a curriculum that focuses on skills and competencies. In this approach students “learn to learn”. (That’s what some of our teachers are currently at)

Future 3 is concerned with powerful disciplinary knowledge that is very different from the “fact” of the Future 1. Future 3 is also concerned with active pedagogies and engaging students with dynamic geographical knowledge: this also distinguishes it from the skills-based Future 2 (This is what our teachers are keen to learn in the NLC – active pedagogies)

The challenge for the NLC is therefore, 

• What is dynamic geographical knowledge? 
• Where do we find them in the current curriculum? 
• How do we teach dynamic geographical knowledge?

Alaric Maude (2016) has been the key proponent for powerful disciplinary knowledge. With the NLC’s focus on deep understanding, it is therefore timely to revisit this idea, and to build upon the 21CC policy focus that we are pushing ahead. See Fig 1 below

Fig 1: A typology of geography’s powerful knowledge (Maude, 2016)

 

TYPE	CHARACTERISTICS
1. Knowledge that provides students with ‘new ways of thinking about the world.’	Using ‘big ideas’ such as: • Place • Space • Environment • Interconnection   These are meta-concepts that are distinguished from substantive concepts, like ‘city’ or ‘climate’.
2. Knowledge that provides students with powerful ways of analysing, explaining and understanding.	Using ideas to: • Analyse E.g. place; spatial distribution ...   • Explain E.g. hierarchy; agglomeration ...   • Generalise E.g. models (push-pull models of migration; demographic transition ...
3. Knowledge that gives students some power over their own knowledge.	To do this, students need to know something about the ways knowledge has been, and continues to be developed and tested in the discipline. This is about having an answer to the question: ‘how do you know?’ This is an underdeveloped area of geographical education, but is a crucial aspect of ‘epistemic quality’ (Hudson, 2016).
4. Knowledge that enables young people to follow and participate in debates on significant local, national and global issues.	School geography has a good record in teaching this knowledge, partly because it combines the natural and social sciences, and the humanities. It also examines significant ‘nexus’ issues such as: food, water and energy security; climate change; development.
5. Knowledge of the World	This takes students beyond their own experience - the world’s diversity of environments, cultures societies and economies. In a sense, this knowledge is closest to how geography is perceived in the popular imagination. It contributes strongly to a student’s ‘general knowledge’.

To conclude, I agree with Ofsted Research’s review (2021, emphasis mine):

1. There is a need to identify both the content (substantiative knowledge) that is to be taught and the knowledge of relationship that allow students to understand the connections between ideas (disciplinary knowledge). Students’ combined application of both substantive and disciplinary knowledge can be described as geographical understanding.

2. Teachers needs to consider how students gain an insight into the discipline when planning the curriculum … one way of doing this is through the powerful knowledge approach. This approach emphasises students need to learn about disciplinary knowledge, in particular that knowledge that is “open to debate, challenge and discussion by subject experts”. Through  building from students’ personal and “everyday” geographies in “dialogue with the academic”, there can be “the possibility of creation of new knowledge that can give learners their sense of social and environmental agency”.

References:

https://geography.org.uk/ite/initial-teacher-education/geography-support-for-trainees-and-ects/learning-to-teach-secondary-geography/geography-subject-teaching-and-curriculum/geography-knowledge-concepts-and-skills/subject-knowledge/powerful-geography-knowledge/

https://www.geocapabilities.org/maude-planning/

Deepening Students' Place Thinking and Writing

The act of writing is part of the process of relating to place – not just a record of it (Cresswell, 2019:3)

 

Photograph of a dragon fly (courtesy of Melanie Lum)

In the teaching of Geography in Everyday Life (GEL) cluster, many of us are often excited yet apprehensive about teaching the topics of relationship between human and nature (1.1) and how people acquire a sense of place (1.2). Not just because they appear as the first two topics of the new upper secondary school year, they also appear deceivingly simple to teach whence in fact, the concepts are more abstract than we might think. When taught well, they can be a wonderful introduction to Geography, engaging and motivating our learners to understand the key concepts of the discipline.

 

I find Tim Cresswell’s ideas useful in helping teachers to design learning experiences that help students discover the key concepts in these two topics. Rawlings Smith provides us with a friendly summary of Cresswell’s book Maxwell Street: Writing and Thinking Place (2019). In this blog, I will be sharing snippets of Cresswell’s ideas through Rawlings Smith’s summary and illustrating them with local examples.

 

Idea 1: Make lists

Cresswell suggested list-making as a simple method to get school students approach a place. Unlike qualitative methods like ethnographic research or quantitative methods to sense make geographical phenomena using numbers, it is straight-forward to get students to write out lists of what can be found in a place. This allows students to focus their energies to observe things, people and activities. This is especially so for the neighbourhood in which the school is located in. Students often rush to and out of school, ignoring details in their haste.

Fig 1: The eco-pond at Punggol Park

Using the example of an eco-pond at Punggol Park (Fig 1), the list may look like this, after classification:

 

Things I can see	People	Activities
·      Natural banks of the pond ·      Pavilions ·      Restaurant ·      Resting benches ·      Dragonflies	·      Cyclists ·      Joggers ·      Hobby anglers  ·      Retirees (?) ·      Students training for cross country	·      Cycling ·      Jogging, walking ·      Fishing ·      Exercising ·      Walking the dogs
Things I can hear	Things I can feel	Things I can smell
·      Calls of white-breasted waterhens ·      Faint shouting of a teacher giving instruction ·      Overhead aeroplane	·      The afternoon heat ·      Serenity, calm ·      Slight breeze	·      The slightly oily odour of fried food from the restaurant

 

Idea 2: Uncover stories, voices and representations

This approach requires a little bit of work on the part of the teacher and student teams. Examples of these include using writings by authors about the place as they write about what they might hear, see and smell. Students may conduct simple interviews or invite users of the place to draw mental maps to uncover how a place may be perceived.

 

Some of these interviews and perspectives might be narratives of the past, which provide an interesting contrast. Historical maps, photographs may even document how changes occurred, and therefore allowing us to infer how identities may have been shaped by these changes. If there are community galleries, museums and preserved buildings or structures for students to visit, Cresswell notes that such “materialities” provoke recall and therefore memories for different groups of people. 

 

For example, growing up in Queenstown in my childhood years, the neon sign that reads “Queen” (in Chinese characters) from the Queensway cinema (Figs 2 and 3) meant a family outing to the bowling alley, a treat of a chicken pie and a Vitagen cultured milk drink for my sister and I. I would still be able to reminisce the taste and flavour of the warm pie as I hear bowling balls crash into the bowling pins! To an outsider, it may be a neon sign from a cinema building which had been torn down, for me, it is more than just that.

Fig 2: The neon sign now is prominently placed at the community museum

 

Fig 3: The old cinema from which the neon sign came from

Idea 3: Offer a chance to engage in critical thinking, deeper inquiry and discourse

As a teacher, processes of place-remaking offer an opportunity to engage students with deeper discussions and critical thinking about issues. A place is not just a neutral stage where we find things, people and activities. People ascribe meanings, representations and even impose a certain narrative to shape behaviours and thinking. 

 

Using an example of Chinatown, it was once a residential and commercial area for more than a century since modern Singapore’s founding (Fig 4). Its remake into a kitsch, touristy locale has been lambasted by critics as unsustainable for businesses, driving away the essential land uses that made it unique in the first place. What is left behind are refurbished buildings that no longer serve their original purposes, instead taken over by trinket shops, restaurants that sell Korean food, cafes and beer gardens that attempt to draw in tourist dollars from international guests (Fig 5).

 

Fig 4: Old Chinatown in the 1960s - 70s

Fig 5: Present day Chinatown with the repurposed shophouses.

Cresswell suggests that people typically develop a “reactionary sense of place” that focuses on rootedness and attachment (Massey, 1991 cited in Rawlings Smith, 2021). These are evident from examples I have mentioned of the Punggol Park and the Queensway cinema. He also distinguishes a “progressive sense of place” (ibid) that focuses on flows, connections and networks, which is not dissimilar from the example of Chinatown.

 

Cresswell argues that the reactionary and progressive sense of place insufficiently explain why places become connected in the way they do. Beyond these two dimensions of sense of place, Cresswell suggests a third. He challenges us to consider how a place might be theorized in a way that goes beyond the opposition of a reactionary or progressive sense of place. This theory of place will require an account of time and change, i.e., temporality as the third dimension. 

 

By bringing power into the discussion, we might therefore ask:

·      What kind of Chinatown might we see today if residential land uses were spared the process of urban renewal ordered by the newly independent government in the 1960s?

 

By using an agentic approach, we might inquire:

·      How might the heritage and identity of Queenstown be remade so that it is more than just another sought after estate that is attractive because it is near the city?

 

By framing it with a theme of agency and sustainability, we could consider:   

·      What are the ways in which Punggol Park can be redesigned to support a sustainable way of living for nearby residents? 

 

Conclusion

Places are multi-dimensional. To think and write about them in a unidimensional reactionary or progressive manner does not do justice to its uniqueness. Casey (1998) likens them to pieces of textile where threads of phenomena, material and intangible culture, practices and meanings are weaved together in a complex web. To help our students uncover a place, we can scaffold their engagement in levels of complexity as I have discussed above, so that they can explore places meaningfully to develop a deeper understanding of geography that will enhance disciplinary imagination, civic consciousness and action.

 

References:

Rawlings Smith, E. (2021), “Maxwell Street: Writing and thinking place”, Geography, Vol 106, part 1, p 53-56

The blog author wishes to acknowledge the originators of the photographs.