"To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and at the same time that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.”
Marshall Berman
The next session I went to at Practical Pedagogies was by Matt Podbury: a colleague of the organiser Russel Tarr at the International School of Toulouse.
If you're interested in this, also check out some previous work by James Riley of the Perse School which was presented at a Teachmeet in Sheffield in 2018.
He has been trialling a new unit on music and its connections with our emotional landscape. This includes a look at favourite music, emotional music and lyrics, sense of place and also the connections with landscapes. It's a chance for younger students to be introduced to some of the classics as well.
For Matt that meant Pulp (with connections with Sheffield where he used to teach) and Queen.
The session was really nicely put together and presented.
One particularly nice aspect of the work was the creation of physical artefacts which were in the form of LPs. Matt had sourced blank white LP sleeves, and also some cheap €1 vinyl records. It also helps that he has a sizeable record collection dating back to the 1990s which he could use to model what we was hoping for. The unit also had an element of emotional geographies about it.
Matt finished by showing a tool called SUNO, which is an AI tool that generates a musical track or song in just a few sentences, based on
He explored the representations of place.
A few previous things that I have done in this area that might also add to what Matt has done - some of these are perhaps more
- A blog post on LivingGeography from 2019 was a reminder of some work on a book called
- Also check out the work of John Wilkinson. He wrote an article on a unit on music which was published in the Autumn 2023 issue of 'Teaching Geography'. Subscribers can download the article for free.
- My Swiftonomics resource exploring the global economic impact of Taylor Swift's ERAS tour.
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