Teaching secondary geography

Introduction

This free course, Teaching secondary geography, is designed for people who are learning to be a teacher, are in their first few years of teaching, or who are working in an educational setting. It identifies and explores some of the key issues around teaching geography in secondary schools. Engaging with these issues and debates will help you to reflect upon and develop your practice as a geography teacher. You will also develop a greater awareness of the wider context of geography education and how this affects geography in the secondary school curriculum.

Section 1 examines how students learn geography, discussing the role of concepts and ‘thinking geographically’. The second section explores how students can be engaged in geography, focusing on the use of enquiry and young people’s geographies to support learning. Section 3 discusses creativity in geography. The final section explores opportunities and challenges related to teaching controversial issues.

This course is based on a learner-centred approach to teaching, which is underpinned by a constructivist view of learning – that learners construct knowledge and understanding for themselves through activities and experiences.

Now listen to an introduction to this course by Gary Spruce:

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Transcript

Introduction to Teaching secondary geography by Gary Spruce.

Gary Spruce

School geography offers fabulous opportunities to help young people to better understand their immediate environment and the wider world and your teaching practice to support them, enabling them to develop an awareness of their place in the world.

This unit is primarily for secondary school geography teachers at the beginning of their careers. It takes a learner-centred approach and looks at some key ideas and concepts you can use to inform your actions in the classroom.

It explores geographical concepts and considers why you should encourage and support students as they develop their own conceptual frameworks. It outlines opportunities for you to increase student autonomy, make learning more directly relevant to young people through a curriculum of engagement and deliver creative approaches to teaching and learning.

Finally, the role of values and the significance of controversial issues in geography are discussed.

I hope you find it interesting and useful.

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As you work through the activities you will be encouraged to record your thoughts on an idea, an issue or a reading, and how they relate to your practice. Hopefully you will have the opportunity to discuss your ideas with colleagues. We therefore suggest that you use a notebook – either physical or electronic – to record your thoughts in a way in which they can easily be retrieved and re-visited. If you prefer, however, you can record your ideas in response boxes in the course – in this case, in order to retrieve your responses you will need to log on to the course.

This OpenLearn course is part of a collection of Open University short courses for teachers and student teachers [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .