This document discusses the influences on curriculum development over a geographer's career spanning 31 years in the classroom and leadership roles. It references influential geographers from the past like Norman Graves and "Jammy" Morris who grappled with tensions in the field. It also discusses more recent experiences co-authoring textbooks, blogging, and developing resources to support everyday geography teaching. The document advocates for curriculum as a coherent narrative shaped by educational principles rather than external policy pressures.

1. 'Exploring everyday
curriculum influences'.
Reflecting on a career: GTE Conference 2024
Image:
Alan
Parkinson
-
CC
licensed

2. ALAN PARKINSON
GEOGRAPHER, AUTHOR
HOD: KING’S ELY PREP
GA PRESIDENT 2021-22
FAWCETT FELLOW 2022-23
@GeoBlogs
a.parkinson@gmail.com
Image:
Richard
Allaway,
CC
licensed

3. 31 years in the classroom
Mentor for ITE colleagues &
led CPD at numerous
universities and MATs

4. Norman Graves - IGU
https://gapresidents.blogspot.com/2020/09/1978-professor-norman-graves.html
"I am conscious that the year of your birth, 1963,
was the year I arrived at the Institute of Education to
head the Geography Department."
Norman was also Simon Catling’s MA Tutor,
along with Molly Long.

5. "I entitled my Presidential Address
"Contrasts and contradictions in
Geographical Education". In the 1970s, I
expressed the tensions which existed
between the scientific nomothetic approach
manifest in the then conceptual revolution,
and the ideographic and humanistic approach
epitomised in Yi Fu Tuan's book 'Topophilia'
Contradictions were evident in the attitudes
of teachers who had difficulty in reconciling
the instrumental aims of education, for
example, coaching students to pass
examinations, and the intrinsic mind-opening
aims of guiding students to question the
validity of certain theories, for example the
Davisian view of landscape evolution."

6. ‘Jammy’ Morris
Joseph Acton Morris
Latymer School, Edmonton
Teacher and Deputy
Headmaster
Chair of Secondary Schools
Committee of GA for 19 years
GA President, 1965

7. “Spell-binding children into learning”

8. 1966

9. KEY GEOGRAPHY SERIES (1988)

10. 2001 - GeographyPages 2003 - SLN Forum
https://web.archive.org/web/20021017094847/http://www.geographypages.co.uk/contents.htm

11. Boxing Day 2004

12. Young People’s Geographies - 2006
Pilot GCSE Geography
https://geography.org.uk/curriculum-support/projects/project-archive/young-peoples-geographies/
Roger Firth,
Tracey Skelton and
Gill Valentine.
https://kespilotgeography.blogspot.
com/

13. Meeting Dan Raven Ellison
https://media.nationalgeographic.org/assets/file/BioBlitz_Mission_Explore.pdf
Images: Tom Morgan Jones

14. Photographs: Bryan Ledgard Images: Tom Morgan Jones

15. Action Plan for Geography - Secondary Curriculum Leader
Manifesto PGQM / SGQM Moderation
https://geography.org.uk/about-us/ga-advocacy-for-geography/ga-manifesto-for-geography/

16. Professor David Lambert (2010)
The curriculum, like pedagogy, is about choices. It is therefore a part of what
we have come to know as ‘professional judgement’. In the case of
curriculum, the choices concern the selections of knowledge we try to teach.
We make these selections according to principles we value, governed by our
sense of educational purpose.
A curriculum shaped by whim, the topics in the news, contemporary themes
of ‘relevance’ – or worse still, policy imperatives laid down by government –
is likely to be incoherent, shallow and like junk food deeply unsatisfying
after the initial fat and sugar rush.
https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/crack-curriculums-core-and-open-world-opportunity

17. Christine Counsell (2018)
“Curriculum is all about power.Decisions about what knowledge to
teach are an exercise of power and therefore a weighty ethical responsibility. What
we choose to teach confers or denies power….
How can we decide what is relevant to the ever-shifting ‘now’?
Worse, relevance quickly merges with perceptions of relevance and, before we know
it, content is chosen for being engaging or deemed ‘relevant’ by the pupil. Then we
have completely lost our moorings.”
https://my.chartered.college/impact_article/taking-curriculum-s
eriously/

18. ERASMUS+
RIP
2011-2023

19. Curriculum making experiences - past and present
Co-author of Hodder textbooks for OCR ‘A’ and ‘B’ GCSE, and series editor and
co-author of an ‘A’ level Geography text for Cambridge University Press.
https://figshare.le.ac.uk/articles/thesis/An
_exploration_of_the_professional_capital
_of_authors_who_recontextualise_knowl
edge_about_place_in_English_A_level_g
eography_textbooks/11806593

20. GA Presidential theme: ‘Everyday Geographies’
https://portal.geography.org.uk/journal/view/J004289
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUfTrDek6JI&t=4800s
Image: Tom Morgan Jones

21. "Little minds are
interested in the
extraordinary; great
minds in the
commonplace."
Elbert Hubbard,
American writer
(1856-1915)

22. LivingGeography and other blogs…

23. Fawcett Fellowship 2022-23 - Alex Standish

24. National Curriculum Framework
Curriculum is content structured as narrative over time.
“Often we use students’ experiences to help them relate to our
curriculum. Too often though we end up reducing it to their
experience.”
Planning the curriculum is a strange mixture of
rational organisation and serendipity.
Eleanor Rawling

25. Tony Binns and Alan Kinder

26. To conclude…

27. Orford, E.J (1918) ‘Geography” what facts shall we teach?” - The
Geographical Teacher, Vol. 9 No. 5 pp.212-215
“In geography on the other hand, you will find that he has no small
knowledge, and that for the simple reason that he hardly passes a day
without a geography lesson, sometimes a brand new one, sometimes
the recapitulation of an old one. The newspaper, even in the biggest
slump in news, contains references to a number of the more important
countries and cities of the world…
Carried on by means of such ‘lessons’ for half a century this widening
and deepening knowledge assumes considerable proportions; but so
gradually… that the subject is wholly unconscious to the process…”

28. Oak National Academy

29. Restlessness and inspiration

30. What next?
iGCSE
A new specification resource that cannot be named
Oak National Writing and Reviewing
GCSE Natural History
Fawcett Fellowship book
Pilot GCSE Geography
Chapter in forthcoming John Catt book

32. Influences / references
Parkinson, A. (2022) Researching the changing professional profile of the Geographical
Association’s Presidents 1893-2021. Routes 2(2): 67-79
https://www.scribd.com/document/341855408/Mission-Explore-Session-Paper-at-Charney-Primar
y-Geography-Conference
Rawling, E. (2020) ‘How and why National Curriculum frameworks are failing geography’, Geography,
105, 2, pp. 69–77.
Kinder, A. and Rawling, E. (2023) ‘The GA’s framework for the school geography curriculum’,
Geography, 108, 2, pp.101-106.