It was down to Southwold on the Suffolk coast, one of my family's favourite spots. The weather was terrific, although the wind picked up towards the end of the day.
I was there to visit Chris Webster from the Geography Fieldwork Academy.
He started the company in 2017 and was building up a growing business offering high quality fieldwork experiences in Southwold, augmented with drone films and imagery and some excellent fieldwork booklets to guide the work that studwnts carried out, and also occasional trips to Hunstanton and Skegness which were additional coastal resorts with some interesting local physical geography. Latterly the NEA is also an area that he covers, providing bespoke days where equipment and ideas are provided so that students can work out a suitable hypothesis and collect the data they need.
Then COVID hit, and he returned to the classroom. He also created some excellent resources on the Norfolk Broads National Park which I drew on for my lockdown teaching and learning. Thanks for those in particular. Check them out.
Chris also followed on from my stint as an OS GetOutside Champion and took up the same role which he holds currently.
The Geography Fieldwork Academy is now back up and running again, based back in Southwold Theatre with a couple of flexible spaces to take small or larger groups and a great deal of expertise about the town and the surrounding coastline: from the eroding coastlines north towards Easton Bavents, along the dynamic sea front and down towards Sizewell nuclear power station across the River Blyth. I had a splendid day with Chris and Syd and they showed me round other parts of the town as well - more to come on that in a future blog post....
Through this week I've been creating maps of schools who have been sharing their experiences on Twitter with the #NationalFieldworkWeek hashtag.
Here's the final map for Friday the 10th.
Thanks to all those who took part.
Particular thanks to Paula Richardson for driving forward the project, and to Alan Kinder and GA colleagues for sorting the website and publicity for the campaign.
Remember that this is not necessarily the end of National Fieldwork Week as such. The resources that we've produced will be available on the GA website, and other schools will be going out in the next six weeks or so ahead of the summer break (although the dates of those vary between the UK nations)
Thanks to the FSC and the other GA strategic partners for tweets and resources
Don't forget to check out the GeogPod we recorded the week before as well.
I'm also going to send out three copies of my 'Why Study Geography?' book to three schools that caught my eye....
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