Blurring The Boundaries

Real geography is rarely cut and dried, says Ben Ballin. To get past the bland facts of the curriculum, we need to ask pupils tricky questions...

Does all good geography start with a question? Despite the removal of explicit references to enquiry in the NC2014 geography Programmes of Study, it is hard to imagine high-quality geography teaching that is not rooted in children’s curiosity about the world, and the resulting need to explore, investigate, puzzle and debate.

The more we explore, the more we discover and know. In the process, we find out that what is worth knowing is seldom cut and dried, unchanging or universally agreed. This means getting under the skin of the Programmes of Study, with their sometimes bland assertions of fact, and asking some tricky questions.

At Key Stage 1, for example, children are asked to know about the ‘four countries and capital cities of the United Kingdom’. That figure was broadly correct at the time of writing, but shortly after this article goes to print there might only be three. Meanwhile, the status of one of the other countries (Northern Ireland) has long been bitterly contested, and a significant minority in Wales would like independence.

That doesn’t stop children from naming those places, finding them on a map, and identifying their key features. Indeed, at Key Stage 1 that might be all we really want them to do, in line with the minimum National Curriculum requirement.

However, as children get older, fixed ideas about what they think they know will start to get in the way of new things that they are finding out. How can we help children become thinking geographers with a ‘curiosity and fascination about the world’ – while still (of course) engaging with the statutory content?

While co-developing some new materials for the publisher Wildgoose, for teaching about the Americas at Key Stage 2, I have been trying to answer that question. Crucial to my approach has been what one teacher recently labelled ‘geography conundrums’.

A geography conundrum is an example from geography that forces learners to think critically about key words and concepts. Are they really quite as tidy as they seem? The more I started to look for them, the more such conundrums there were.

Take a simple task: drawing the outline of a continent on a photocopied map. With a political map, this might seem straightforward: indeed, the boundaries may even be marked. If children move to a relief map, then they may begin to ask questions about how precise the borders are. Where exactly in the Urals does Europe stop and Asia begin? Why that point and not another? Do they include the continental shelf, territorial waters, outlying islands?

If children try this task with a map of tectonic plates, they will find that the continental plates seldom – if ever – match up with the continents. For example, the North American plate covers parts of Siberia, all of Greenland and about half of the North Atlantic Ocean.

This apparently simple task – using only three maps – raises profound questions about what children include and what they leave out; about how to define a continent.

If children go on to look at traditional definitions of ‘continent’, then how do they work? Could Europe, for example, ever be described as ‘a contiguous land mass, surrounded by water’? Using different ways of describing continents, how many do children think there actually are? The National Curriculum tells us there are seven (in the USA children would learn that there are six), but there are at least 13 continental plates – though some geologists suggest there are really only two or three.

Confusing? Maybe, but that is the nature of the world: of real, living geography. Moreover, in doing this, the children are really getting to know and understand what they can mean by the language they use, where the places they are dealing with are situation, and what the arguments are.

We can find geography conundrums for locational knowledge. We think we know where places are, but in what country or continent are Ceuta, Melilla, Reunion, Martinique, French Guiana? In what region is Gibraltar? (One political definition places it within the South West of England.) How many countries are there in the world, and why do different sources give us different answers?

Geography conundrums not only make core knowledge more interesting, but they really sharpen up children’s geographical thinking. They stimulate debate, and frame geography as a matter of questioning, not disembodied facts.

About the author

Ben Ballin is a primary geography consultant. His book with Jane Whittle, Back to Front – The Americas, is published by Wildgoose in Autumn 2014.