April 2025
14th April: Geography, Green Education, and getting the message out there
The start of the Easter holidays saw me share my Ranger story with the London National Park City team. I shared my thoughts and reflections on why I became a Ranger, how I think we can move the LNPC movement forwards, and what I hope to achieve as a Ranger in the future.
My thoughts can be read here.
Perhaps most exciting for us geography teachers are the resources we’re working on. I was thrilled to receive funding through one of LNPC’s Small Grants Programme. We’re using it to create teaching resources about the movement – materials that tie into key geography topics like urban greening, climate resilience, flood management, and adaptation. These will feature real-life case studies of London-based projects and will be designed to slot easily into the KS3, KS4 and KS5 curriculum. The idea is to equip teachers with up-to-date, engaging content they can use in their lesson the next day, week or month. It’s an exciting opportunity to amplify the work of LNPC through schools and ensure students are learning about these crucial issues through a local lens. Watch this space…
10th April: Secrets of the Thames at the London Museum, Docklands
Since 2019 I’ve been the Chair of the Teacher Panel for the new London Museum and linked to this work was kindly given tickets to this new exhibition at the Docklands site of the London Museum. The Secrets of the Thames exhibition opened in early April and is a wonderful exploration of the river and the city through mudlarking. As a geographer I loved how the focus on treasures discovered whilst mudlarking resulted in a synoptic exhibition that told varied stories of London across a huge span of time.
There were plenty of highlights but I I particularly enjoyed exhibits that asked us to question what the mudlarkers of the future might find. What evidence would be found on the foreshore of 3025? Which pieces of our consumption will survive and what will it say about our society today? What will London look like in 1000 years time?
The exhibition ends with a reference to the tides that enables mudlarking to happen and there is a beautiful suspended moon in the gallery with seating inviting you to sit and listen to the sounds of the Thames whilst admiring the beautiful sculpture. My key takeaway from the exhibition? Nothing is truly ever thrown away… there is no ‘away’- everything consumed ends up somewhere…
9th April: A video audit
Every now and then I like to do a ‘video audit’ of the latest clips produced by my go-to sources for high-quality video clips in the classroom. These are The Economist, Vox and the BBC World Service. In the past I’ve tweeted and shared the clips that I’ve found and embedded into lessons and this thread from 2023 and this one from 2020 might be useful for teachers of A-Level geography (particularly the Edexcel specification).
Today’s audit was less fruitful than I thought it might be but I found the following which are useful and will be shared with colleagues across our Trust upon our return from the Easter holidays:
For teacher subject knowledge on the history of Taiwan and how it relates to today’s geopolitics this short clip from The Economist is useful.
For teacher subject knowledge on hurricanes and ‘the dirty side’ of a hurricane, this Vox video clip is excellent. I definitely learnt something new when watching this- turns out I had a misconception about why hurricane tracks are shown as cones in the forecasts..!
Finally, the Thames Barrier has dropped in and out of our KS3 geography teaching over my career thus far but when we did teach about it, it was hard to find high-quality information and graphics about it and how it works. This Vox video clip might be useful for anyone who teaches about it.