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