Had breakfast early, as the hotel was full apparently as Man Utd were playing Barcelona in the Champions League that night, in fact Simon Oakes was staying in the same hotel and they'd apparently booked the whole floor for the Barcelona entourage. They certainly weren't in the Premier Inn.
A short walk to the venue, and the day began with plenty of greetings with friends old and new and conversations. One of the great things about the GA Conference is the chance to meet up with people who you might see only once a year, but take up your chats as if you see them the whole time. Social media has helped with that to some extent, and I met many people who I regularly exchange chats with over Twitter / Facebook etc.
Started the day with coffee, and chats. The programme has full details on all sessions, and reading these sometimes leads to a change of decision about what to attend. I always try to attend sessions which are intriguing and a little bit different. I met with Des McDougall, who was doing a session on VR Glaciers and very kindly helped me with a conference I did for Inside Government last year.
Stephen Scoffham's Presidential Address was called 'Celebrating Geography' and he made some interesting points on the intersections of knowledge and emotion, using the diagram to the right. He also continued the tradition of showing your own school report - I have plenty of those.
He shared my caution about the connection between neuroscience and pedagogy
After coffee it was into a lecture with Simon Oakes, who was blitzing through a 'chat' on place representation and meaning. He said this was challenging for some people because it was quite a radical geography - which was why I loved the original Edexcel 2008 iteration and started the NING which supported so many people through those changes (now sadly gone to the digital graveyard)
There were some interesting discussions about the extent to which student agency (which was included in the specification, was used in reality) and I reminded people of the Young People's Geographies project and also the work of the OCR Pilot GCSE.
The idea of meaning also offers some options for discussions, as meanings come from different people. He talked about the ways that Coastal communities are represented, and there is certainly plenty to explore here on a cultural geography front.
The use of terms like encoding / decoding reminded me of the Media Studies 'A' level that my son is currently taking and the use of semiotics.
Simon referred to Jean Sprackland's book 'Strands' which I have read, which covers familiar territory for him on the Crosby coast near Liverpool.
He also referred to the Grace Nichols' poem: 'Hurricane hits England'
This is used in GCSE English, and so students will have analysed this poem. They can use the same skills to perhaps analyse other poetry.
He referred to the need for student agency, and the growth of Instagram and blogs as a way of publishing new sources. Check out Fangirlquest.com for some examples of representations of places from a different author.
By now, there had already been over 20 sessions at the conference to choose from and it was only lunchtime. Duncan Hawley was talking about Physical Geography in the next session, while lunch time also saw a number of Teacher to Teacher sessions, which at around 20 minutes long are well worth catching for a brief insight into another colleague's practice.
Plenty of people were packing into a session involving colleagues from Gapminder.
I was headed for Richard Allaway's session next....
A short walk to the venue, and the day began with plenty of greetings with friends old and new and conversations. One of the great things about the GA Conference is the chance to meet up with people who you might see only once a year, but take up your chats as if you see them the whole time. Social media has helped with that to some extent, and I met many people who I regularly exchange chats with over Twitter / Facebook etc.
Started the day with coffee, and chats. The programme has full details on all sessions, and reading these sometimes leads to a change of decision about what to attend. I always try to attend sessions which are intriguing and a little bit different. I met with Des McDougall, who was doing a session on VR Glaciers and very kindly helped me with a conference I did for Inside Government last year.
Stephen Scoffham's Presidential Address was called 'Celebrating Geography' and he made some interesting points on the intersections of knowledge and emotion, using the diagram to the right. He also continued the tradition of showing your own school report - I have plenty of those.He shared my caution about the connection between neuroscience and pedagogy
After coffee it was into a lecture with Simon Oakes, who was blitzing through a 'chat' on place representation and meaning. He said this was challenging for some people because it was quite a radical geography - which was why I loved the original Edexcel 2008 iteration and started the NING which supported so many people through those changes (now sadly gone to the digital graveyard)
There were some interesting discussions about the extent to which student agency (which was included in the specification, was used in reality) and I reminded people of the Young People's Geographies project and also the work of the OCR Pilot GCSE.
The idea of meaning also offers some options for discussions, as meanings come from different people. He talked about the ways that Coastal communities are represented, and there is certainly plenty to explore here on a cultural geography front.The use of terms like encoding / decoding reminded me of the Media Studies 'A' level that my son is currently taking and the use of semiotics.
Simon referred to Jean Sprackland's book 'Strands' which I have read, which covers familiar territory for him on the Crosby coast near Liverpool.
He also referred to the Grace Nichols' poem: 'Hurricane hits England'
This is used in GCSE English, and so students will have analysed this poem. They can use the same skills to perhaps analyse other poetry.
He referred to the need for student agency, and the growth of Instagram and blogs as a way of publishing new sources. Check out Fangirlquest.com for some examples of representations of places from a different author.
By now, there had already been over 20 sessions at the conference to choose from and it was only lunchtime. Duncan Hawley was talking about Physical Geography in the next session, while lunch time also saw a number of Teacher to Teacher sessions, which at around 20 minutes long are well worth catching for a brief insight into another colleague's practice.
Plenty of people were packing into a session involving colleagues from Gapminder.
I was headed for Richard Allaway's session next....
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