REFLEXIONS ON A LIFE IN GEOGRAPHICAL EDUCATION

Norman Graves

Introduction

This is not a learned article in which the writer will manifest his erudition by citing

large numbers of references. It is not a report of empirical research. Neither is it a

polemical tract, arguing for a particular view of geography or geographical education.

It is simply the musings of an older person on his experience of a profession, which

he entered at the age of 25 and worked in until his retirement 40 years later. Inevitably

the views expressed are coloured by his own social background and by the cultural

setting in which he worked. It is a personal story and the reader must decide how

relevant it is to him or her.

Leanings towards geography

I can recall being interested in geography in the primary school in France which I

attended, though precisely why it is difficult for me to fathom as the lessons seemed

to be exercises in memorising names of rivers, tributaries and political divisions. We

were given a cardboard cut out of the shape of France around which we drew in pencil

and wrote the names of rivers and towns in appropriate places. I must have enjoyed

this exercise as I kept that cut out for many years into adulthood. In secondary schools

in England, I was fortunate in being taught by teachers who stimulated my interest in

the subject, partly by making me undertake exercises which enable me to learn by

doing rather than simply memorising information, and partly by using devices that

stressed the reality behind geographical information, for example by making us

correspond with the captain of a tramp steamship which wandered all round the

world. Not that I had much idea as to the educational purposes of geography; it was

part of the school curriculum and we pupils had to do it. But I enjoyed, in the pre –
television age, finding out how other people lived and learning explanations for the

natural processes which occurred on our earth.

Interest and performance in examinations, did not in my case go hand in hand. I did

much better in physics and chemistry than in geography in the school leaving

examination. Although I had begun to think that teaching might well be a career for

me, financial circumstances did not permit me to stay on at school. At 16 years of age

I found myself on the job market and given my performance in physics, entered the

telephone industry by being employed in a laboratory where new telephone circuits

were tested out. Essentially this should have suited someone with an understanding of

the scientific method, since essentially the worked consisted of comparing theoretical

predictions as to how a circuit should work, with how it did work in practice, finding

the cause of the malfunction and making appropriate adjustments. Alas, my

performance in physics proved to be more the result of a good memory than an

understanding of the scientific method.

Commitment to teaching geography

After 4 years I decided that I had to attempt to revert to my original desire to become

a teacher. I proceeded in evening school to acquire the necessary qualifications to

enable me to become a teacher of geography as this subject fascinated me more than

the intricacies of electric circuitry. Again I was fortunate in being taught during my

pre-university year by Dr Eric Briault, an enthusiastic geographer who subsequently

became an inspector for geography for the London Education Authority and

eventually its Chief Education Officer. At the London School of Economics and

Political Science I was taught geography by Stamp, Beaver, Wooldridge and

Harrison-Church, and Economics by Lionel Robbins. Although at the time, the degree

programme for which I studied, seemed very wide in scope, with a variety of courses
in statistics, economic history and social and political theory, as well as geography

and economics, it opened my mind to areas of knowledge and ways of knowing which

proved illuminating and useful.

Getting a degree was, however, only half the battle. I had to qualify as a teacher. This

I did by attending a one year course at the University of London’s Institute of

Education. It was during that year that the reality of teaching impinged on my

consciousness. Prior to entering the Institute of Education, I undertook a period of

teaching practice in a non-selective secondary school in inner London. There I found

that not all children were keen to absorb whatever I wished to teach them, and that

what I was trying to impart might have no meaning for them. I can recall attempting

to teach a class of 14 year-old girls about measures being taken in post-war Britain

control the location of industry, only to be asked at the end of the lesson “What does

location mean?”.

It was at the Institute of Education that I learnt the need to find an educational

justification for teaching geography and to limit one’s objective in any lesson to what

could be achieved with that group of pupils or students in the time available. The

dominating idea at that time was that pupils should be led by questioning to examine

evidence provided and arrive at an understanding of a relationship in human

geography or a process in physical geography. The thinking on geographical

education in Britain was dominated by the writings of James Fairgrieve, in particular,

his book Geography in School. Since Geography was about the world we lived in, we

were urged to develop geographical ideas through the examination of the main

regions of the world. Later I became aware later that an idea, which had been useful at

a certain period in time, could become an orthodoxy acting as a brake on the

development of new ideas. Fundamentalism in religion and in other spheres, are other
examples of such orthodoxies. The ultimate aim, however, was to open up young

minds to think for themselves and become autonomous learners who could challenge

orthodox beliefs.

Classroom experience

When I started teaching in a traditional grammar (selective) school for boys, I became

aware that the culture of the school did not necessarily match the ideas that I had

imbibed in my training year. Many of the older teachers had gone straight from

university to teaching and were dismissive of what they saw as educational froth.

Opening up young minds and discussing ideas was all very well, but what was

required of teachers was they produced examination results. Then there was the need

to understand the youth culture of adolescent boys, which apparently differed

radically from my own. How should one react to ostensibly rebellious nature? Was

one in authority, or simply an authority on a particular discipline? Did a teacher have

to act as a policeman in order to survive? Classroom management seemed in those

early years to present more problems than the pedagogy of teaching geography.

Although with time and experience, some of these early problems faded into the

background, they inevitably remained, and when I moved to a technical and then a

comprehensive school, I was to meet behavioural problems which stemmed more

from the social and family backgrounds of the students than from trials of

adolescence. What could geography do for those whose lives were in some way

blighted?

Geography moves on

While coping with the tasks of running a geography department in a school, I was

immersed in organisational problems: curriculum design; obtaining teaching aids

including textbooks; allocating tasks to members of the department; drafting test and
examination questions; balancing the departmental budget; and so on. Meanwhile

geography at the research level did not stand still. The curriculum process and design

movement made me aware that curriculum design had to keep pace with the progress

made in geographical research if the geography taught in school was not to become

ossified in form no longer related to the modern discipline. Yet often the official

examinations tended to reflect what teachers taught, and what teachers taught was

based on a view of geography that was outdated. This was a classic “Catch Twenty-

two” situation, which it took many years of campaigning to change. One could

sympathise with the teacher who, among his or her many duties, tried to find time to

keep up to date with geographical and educational research but could not manage it. I

was one of those teachers.

When I moved into the world of teacher education, I became acutely aware that many

of my students were ahead of me in their understanding of current geographical

theory. I set about trying to fill the gaps in my understanding because by now I had

the time to do it. I was no longer teaching from 9.00 am to 4.00 pm, no longer having

to deal with reluctant learners, no longer having to mark the work of many classes of

30 or more pupils. I could again enjoy studying and stretching my mind.

The move from idiographic to nomothetic geography I welcomed as teaching could

concentrate on what were general applicable principles rather than attempt the

impossible task of covering the world in regional description. The ‘conceptual

revolution’ of the 1960s was often associated with quantification, though

quantification consisted mainly of research techniques, which might or might not be

applicable, depending on the problem to be solved. Subsequently, humanistic

geography argued reasonably that not all problems of geographic nature could be

analysed within a positivistic framework and indeed that values played an important
part in human decision-making. As someone who had in his younger days studied

economics, I was glad that human geography was no longer an isolated discipline, but

had rejoined the social sciences and could hold a dialogue with them. Physical

geography had never cut itself off from the physical sciences, indeed it was derived

from geology and meteorology, though it also had suffered from orthodoxies as in the

case of the Davisian system of geomorphology.

The subsequent discourses on radicalism, structuralism, feminism and postmodernism

in geography, somewhat complicated the situation. To my mind these were ways of

viewing empirical experiences through the prism of particular systems of thought and

values. These discourses were often at a level of abstraction which seemed divorced

from the empirical world of school geography. But it was important for the teacher to

understand the various ‘cultural turns’ that geography was experiencing even if their

application to the classroom situation was limited.

Curriculum Theory and Geography

Perhaps one of the most influential aspects of educational research as I saw it, was the

development of curriculum theory. It is a measure of the relative slowness of the

transmission of ideas in the pre-internet age that an idea developed in the USA in the

1940s, was not to affect Europe until the 1960s. I saw it as a liberating influence since

it provided a means of developing the geography curriculum in accordance witj

educational principles. The various curriculum development projects in the USA and

in Britain were inspired by curriculum theory. But to get the full benefit from new

thinking along those lines it seemed to me to be important to get more interaction with

people involved in the process. Hence my invitation to Nicholas Helburn, director of

the High School Geography Project from Colorado, and Joseph Stoltman who had

undertaken research into children’s understanding of hierarchical spatial relationships

from Western Michigan University in the USA to spend a year teaching at the

Institute of Education in London. Similarly, we benefited from inputs from Australian

colleagues who either came to teach or undertake research at the Institute. Notable

among those were Brian Spicer from Monash University and Donald Biddle from

Sydney Teachers’ College. Don Biddle was to make a signal contribution to the

application of curriculum theory to the school geography curriculum.

Internationalism and Geographical Education

Thes experiences convinced me of the necessity of maintaining international contacts.

I was therefore fortunate to become a member of the International Geographical

Union’s Commission on Geographical Education and later its chairperson. We were

also fortunate in being able to obtain the support of UNESCO in the organisation of

international regional meetings on geographical education in South East Asia, in the

Africa and in the Arab World, and in the development of Source Books whose aim

was to assist the development of geographical education in the regions concerned. I

became conscious of the uneven development of thinking about geographical

education and the way in which cultural assumptions inherent in national education

systems, could act as a brake on the evolution of geographical education. I became

convinced of the need to further develop the free flow of ideas across national

boundaries, even if some of these ideas were unpalatable to governments in certain

territories. Perhaps one of the most heart-warming events which resulted from this

free flow of ideas when I discovered that my New Movements in the Study and

Teaching of Geography had been translated into Russian in the then Soviet Union

before Glastnost and Perestroyika.

To my mind , the world is threatened by two main forces. First, unprincipled

economic development, without regard to its environmental effects, or to the

impoverishment of certain peoples. Second, the intolerance of those who believe that

their religion or philosophical system is the only valid one.In my view geographical

education should be involved vigorously in the struggle to combat those two forces. It

will be a long and sometimes bitter struggle.