Personal Geographies & Classroom Spaces

1. Personal Geographies & Classroom Spaces GTE 2013 Sue Bermingham MMU

2. Case Study -The emergence of Personal Geography in the UK curriculum • this has been examined in: policy and curricular documentation; in the academic discipline of geography; in teacher education in one institution; and as understood by pupils in 5 schools.

3. Reflexive awareness • Boundary between researcher and ITE tutor • Initial tendency towards numbers & why I became disillusioned with this • Geography and gender – prior experiences of self

4. Chapter 4 Methodology • Case Study approach – adopted to facilitate in-depth reflexive engagement in the research context • Chapter – focus for this term

5. Chapter 6 Educational Spaces • This chapter focuses on the discipline of geography to aid our understanding of educational spaces for teaching and learning (i.e. classrooms). • Classrooms provide the location for teaching and learning of the National Curriculum including the curriculum expectation that geography teachers will build upon the pupils’ prior personal experiences of geography and offer opportunities to build upon the ‘personal scale’ of geography.

6. Liminal space • Visiting 5 schools in the North West of England to carry out a 30 minute pupil group interview (videoed) gave me new understanding of the concept liminal space, my time in school was temporary, typically 1 hour, the physical spaces the school had allocated for videoing a group interview with pupils took on a temporary configuration for this one off interview experience.   • I reflected and considered the impact of spaces in particular the temporary existence in specific spaces had upon myself, and others namely pupils and trainee teachers. I considered how familiar spaces could become intimidating spaces as I visited with a changed professional role.

7. Use of Thrift (2003) 4 notions of Space: • Empirical • Flow • Image & • Place

8. Using Theory to open up ‘space’ • Thrift’s four conceptualisations of space add to the complexity and personal challenge as a geography educator defining the key geographical concept of space (and place) to pupils, novice teachers and to the reader of the thesis. • Not necessarily a clear boundary between Thrift’s categories – it’s about how they can be used to open up the space of space.

9. My interpretation of theory

10. ‘Humble’ classroom chair • Empirical – standard size, materials etc • Flow – daily movements / interactions with pupils/ cleaning staff/ life cycle of chair • Image – visual - colour • Place – human/ chair blurring, improvisations- interaction, imprint

11. Visual analysis of Research Data Spaces: • Technology classroom • RE classroom • Geography classroom • Faith room • Staff work room Video data

12. Plastic chairs

13. Journal entry • The soft velour beige high backed fixed seating in ‘faith room’. The seating linked to my prior experience of public houses, social gathering spaces, and gave an immediate reaction that paper based work was unlikely in this space.

14. Challenge of plastic chairs • For a living, breathing, growing adolescent to remain passively sat on a hard plastic chair for 30 minutes is an incredible challenge, to control all aspects of one’s body to be perceived by others as fully engaged isan incredible feat. • Our physiology requires us to regularly blink to lubricate our eyes, to regularly look close then at distance to look after the eye muscles was evident in the recordings as pupils moved their eyes up, down, around the space. This natural eye exercise led on occasion for an individual to re positioning body e.g. Turning around seeing a senior teacher in the room pupil places hands on face (CHHS), Looking around another pupil and coming face to face with the camera lens (CHHS).

15. Standardized spaces / Individuality • It is within classrooms, these unique educational spaces with their standardized plastic chairs and melamine tables that geography the school subject is taught. • Pupils strive to find tiny improvisations to enhance their feeling of place within classrooms, and yet the curriculum appears to value individuality, personalisation, sharing of personal experiences of geography. • UK educational spaces are designed to limit our ability to move, twitch, exercise or embrace our surroundings. No time is provided for us to care for our possessions and environment. In such a controlled environment who benefits from sharing personal experiences and information, why should we care?

16. Affect • A communal experience within the space was particularly evident when pupils shared unique personal insights, the group all turned towards the pupil speaking with facial expressions of wonderment. • There was a communal swelling of admiration from pupils hearing a pupil share their experience having ‘seen a volcano erupt’ (AB), and a communal awe and wonder as we all looked towards the individual pupil sharing her experience of an earthquake (OL).