A cross posting from my blog on the GA and all of its Presidents - 107 to date.
This is a very well-written and absorbing autobiography that tells us much about geographical education from 1960 to 2001. During this period John Bale's career included posts at Townfield Secondary Modern School for Boys, where he encountered 'deadbeat teachers' and 'lively' boys, Avery College of Education and the University of Keele. In 1998 he was appointed to a professorship in the latter's Education Department.
The book contains many insights into the important influences during this period of, for example, the Geographical Association, the London Schools Geographical Group and the 1970 Charney Manor Conference. Individual geographers played an important role in Bale's career, including 'the dynamic walking whirlwind' Rex Walford and Michael Wise. Bale was a sportsman with a specialist interest in sport geography, in which he became a leading world figure. The book contains reflections on the influence of subject trends on his thinking in this respect, including 'quantitative' and 'welfare' geography.
Rather depressingly, he became less interested in teacher training, finding lesson observation 'often a numbing experience where the main objective seemed to be one of control'.
Arguably, Bale's influential work could have been used much more in lower secondary and primary geography to develop both the cognitive and affective dimensions of the subject, given that sport is an important motivational topic for many young people. For example, the very influential 'Geography for the Young School Leaver' Project's learning materials included very little on this theme.
In 2001 Bale took early retirement from Keele 'severing (his) increasingly tenuous (and increasingly tedious) links with geographical education'.
In the same year he assumed a new role in the Centre of Sports Studies at the University of Aarhus where, until his retirement in 2006, he made very significant contributions in the humanistic and social scientific fields of sport. 'Professional' autobiography is a genre which other geographers might consider: for example, some long standing geography teachers might usefully describe their involvement in the 'golden years' of curriculum development in geographical education in the latter third of the last century. It is important that this is recorded given that, hopefully, there might one day be a return to these exciting processes of curriculum change in the subject.
Source:
Higginbottom, Trevor. Geography, vol. 100, no. 2, 2015, pp. 121–121. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43825437. Accessed 16 Sept. 2023.
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