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.