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Humankind

Scene from 1990 film version of Lord of the Flies (source)

Script of an assembly delivered by Hermione Baines and David Alcock via voiceover Powerpoint to Bradford Grammar School pupils on Friday 15 January 2021. The slide set and notes are available upon request from @DavidAlcock1

Deep down, what is human nature? What are we really like underneath?  Novelist William Golding explored this idea in his 1951 novel ‘The Lord of the Flies’.  It tells the story of a group of well-brought up English schoolboys, shipwrecked on a deserted island. To start with, the boys organise themselves and try to have fun and wait for rescue. However, as the days go by, their rules break down. As fear takes over, they descend into appalling savagery and violence.  We won’t spoil  the ending for those of you have not yet read it, but lets just say it doesn’t end well – as this still from a film of the book suggests​.

William Golding did not have a positive view of human nature – he said, ‘Even if we start with a clean slate, our nature compels us to make a muck of it’ and ‘Man produces evil as a bee produces honey’.

Thomas Hobbes by John Michael Wright (source)

Golding’s view of human nature is widely held. The 17th Century philosopher Thomas Hobbes considered what humans were like before we created ‘society’ – he argued that in a ‘state of nature’ human beings are driven by fear – fear of the other – our lives would be a state of permanent war and conflict – deep down, this is what we are.​

As a historian, it’s easy to find examples of humans being driven by fear, greed, and hatred to do terrible things to each other; it sometimes doesn’t seem to take much to turn apparently civilised human beings into aggressive, cruel creatures. Is this what humans, deep down, are like?

The island of ‘Ata (source)

This is the uninhabited island of ‘Ata.  It is 100 nautical miles from the main island of Tonga, which is itself 2000 nautical miles east of the Australian mainland.  What does it have to do with Golding – or indeed Hobbes?​

Well, in 1966, Peter Warner, an Australian man in his 20s, sailed his boat to the island, which had been deserted for over a hundred years.  But he saw fire – a sign of life – and when he drew closer he found six boys.  These six boys told him that they had ‘borrowed’ a boat from the main island of Tonga, they’d got caught in a storm, and eventually landed on Ata, fifteen months previously.  The boys were taken back to the mainland, where their families had given them up for dead.​

Six boys, on an island – a recipe for disaster, right? Rivalries, fighting, bullying?  No.  Quite the opposite.

Peter Warner, crew, and the six boys, 1968 (source)

The boys – seen here in a reunion photo with Captain Warner a few years after the incident – had actually set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.​

While the boys in Lord of the Flies come to blows over the fire, those in this real-life version tended their flame so it never went out, for more than a year.​

The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and ended with song and prayer.​

Captain Warner wrote in his memoir:  “Life has taught me a great deal, including the lesson that you should always look for what is good and positive in people.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau by Maurice Quentin de la Tour (source)

One example doesn’t prove much.  But it got Dutch author Rutger Bregman thinking: was Golding’s book symptomatic of a negative view of human nature which doesn’t really reflect how most humans actually behave?​

​The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that in a state of nature, we are naturally cooperative beings: our essence is to work together.  But Bregman argues that Rousseau’s message has been overwhelmed by a more cynical image of humanity, which has been proclaimed in films and novels, history books and scientific research – and perhaps even in education?​

​Bregman argues that this distrust has been driven by individualism, an increasingly overdramatic media, and politicians keen to get the support of voters who are scared of ‘other people’ (does this remind you of a certain US president?).

Rutger Bregman and Humankind cover (source)

Bregman has a hopeful message – he thinks we think ourselves worse than we really are, and this is what causes the problems because we assume that people are bad, when the vast majority of people are in essence good at heart – he asks us to take a positive view of the world.​

​We have been thinking that recent events – particularly the way people have coped with the pandemic – support this hopeful view of humankind. Despite some people behaving selfishly with no regard for the welfare of their fellow human beings, behavioural scientists suggest that the vast majority of people have been cooperating for the greater good, wanting to help each other and sticking to the rules, even when they could get away with breaking them.​

​As Bregman says,  We live on a planet where people are deeply inclined to be good to one another. Do good in broad daylight, and don’t be ashamed of your generosity. Its time for a positive view of humankind’.

[Inspired? Read about Hopeful Education – whose mission is to encourage young people to ‘evaluate progress, believe in humanity, and create a better world’ – in this post, and follow @HopefulEd on Twitter.]

Humankind by Rutger Bregman (2020) is published by Bloomsbury.

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Geographies of the air – hiding in plain sight? Pt 2: militarisation and intensification

Co-authored with Harvey Logan (@harv_logan / www.theairplanesblog.wordpress.com)
Fig. 1: Delivery Drone by mollyrose89 (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Welcome back, and we trust you have refuelled and are ready for another journey through the geographies of the air! Part one of this two-part series, where we explored air’s importance in creating a sense of place, air as a medium, and some cultural geographies of air, can be found here.

In the post below, we explore the militarisation of airspace and aerial intensification, we discuss how much attention air might deserve in the future, and we take a brief look at whether there is room in the school curriculum for a deeper consideration of the geographies of air.

Militarised airspace

Militarised air power, much like air pollution, often disrespects borders. The shooting down of commercial airliners is one obvious example. PS752 and IR655 in Iran, MH17 in Ukraine, KAL007 in Russia. This list is not exhaustive. It is important to remember that it is not only rebel groups or insurgent governments who shoot down airliners – IR655 was downed by the US Navy.

Battles in the air are rarely fought over territory. They are strategic endeavours or shows of power and involve a significant amount of what could be construed as ‘willy waving’. Long-range missions by Russian aircraft venture close to the airspace boundaries of the USA or its NATO allies, and elicit a response from fast jets like those in the RAF’s QRA squadron. American ‘spy planes’ regularly undertake 30+ hour sorties from US the East Coast to the Baltic and back again, supported by aerial refuelling tankers, essentially just to show they can. Airspace in the Alaskan region has seen a lot of this type of military activity recently, with clear geopolitical links to both nations’ ambitions in the Arctic.

Concerns have been raised for decades about militarised urbanism (see, for example, Mike Davis’s City of Quartz), but these have risen in more popular consciousness recently with the targeted use of military resources in urban environments becoming more commonplace. Low-flying helicopters, operated in a manner incompatible with accepted safe procedures, were used this year to disperse BLM protesters in New York City and Washington DC, as shown in this video: https://www.nbcnews.com/video/watch-helicopters-hover-low-over-protesters-in-washington-84223557542.

Drones

The military applications of unmanned drones (UAV’s) can be criticised for encouraging a lack of restraint in combat as there are no ‘lives on the line’. People living in conflict zones have reported feeling a state of fear when skies are blue, as they know drones will be flying.

Equally though, drone technology has contributed to beneficial and humanitarian developments. The inclusion of UAV’s in medical supply chains can be life changing in rural areas. Drones can revolutionise the delivery of blood, medicines and vaccines to remote health facilities where land-based transport is hard to come by (see Fig.1 and https://www.doveair.org). For some countries, especially where roads are scarce and of poor quality, UAV’s may be the only way to deliver a refrigerated COVID-19 vaccine to rural and isolated areas before it thaws.

UAV’s can also be used for GIS or mapping, assisting in the creation of high-quality maps and 3D models which can be used to assist with humanitarian disaster response or climate science, amongst other things (http://www.sensefly.com/industries/case-studies).

Aerial intensification

The increasing usage of drones for deliveries may herald a new ‘aerial intensification’, bringing into play considerations of aerial congestion, noise pollution, collisions, and risks to other animate and inanimate objects.  These issues will be even more important to contemplate when humans are brought into the mix: ‘urban air mobility’ (UAM) and the concept of the ‘flying car’ have prompted social concerns relating to airspace. With UAM, this includes the ability to use aerial transport to opt-out of shared public space – see, for example: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/reports/2020/05/28/481148/flying-cars-will-undermine-democracy-environment/

The development of UAM will move urban airspace into the regulatory lens of urban planning. Decisions around land use will incorporate airspace as an important aspect of the city and its transport network rather than simply as empty space.

And it is not just flying vehicles using the air for transport. There is a growing number of urban cable cars around the world. See here: https://www.londonreconnections.com/2020/the-incredible-lightness-of-being-cable-cars-a-legitimate-urban-transport-mode-but-not-in-the-uk/

A declining concern?

Aside from pollution and climate change, understanding the ways that humans interact with the air may in the near future be a declining concern, as environmental regulations, moral concerns (such as voluntary scaling back and ‘flight shaming’), and the growth of high speed rail lines, especially in emerging economies, may stymie the growth of flights.

Some commentators suggest that hyperloops (see Fig. 2) (or perhaps maglevs and vactrains, for those of us who approve of the technology but not of Musk’s assessment that “Individualised mass transit is the future”) may reduce intra- and even inter-continental travel by air. The massive drop in air traffic thanks to covid-19 related restrictions and fears may accelerate this decline.  This downturn may be a temporary one, but will we see a shift away from more ‘superfluous’ flights such as for meetings and job interviews?  Conference calling capabilities have improved and have become commonplace.  Also, an increase in virtual reality technology could mean that such remote meetings might begin to feel more visceral.

Fig. 2: Virgin Hyperloop One on display in New York City, 2019. Source: Z22 (CC BY-SA 4.0)

On the other hand, airspace may retain its importance, as a greater focus on airspace management (including next-generation air traffic control and restricting contrails) is one of the best tools to reduce aviation emissions in the medium-term. Along with drones and urban air mobility, this will require us to start changing how we use airspace. In these respects, airspace is not a declining concern.

Moreover, continuing economic development in emerging and developing countries will almost certainly lead to an increase in flights; see, for example, the growth of the China-Africa airlink, which will override the ‘first world’ trends of flying less.  And although it could be a long time away, the widespread adoption of more environmentally friendly forms of aviation may also lead to a busier aerospace.

Air and outer space

Although ‘air’ is not synonymous with ‘outer space’, there is a continuum between the two, and geographers should note that  control of outer space has risen up the geopolitical and business agenda – here, one thinks of Space X, the renaissance of missions to Mars, the United States Space Force and an emboldened China, whose most recent mission, Chang’e 5, has reinvigorated debate about lunar missions. There is an overlap here with next-generation airspace management, as satellite-based aircraft tracking has enabled this.

Air in the curriculum

The Key Stage 3 national curriculum programme of study for geography explicitly focuses  on “the location of globally significant places – both terrestrial and marine” (Department for Education, 2013: 1) but there is no mention of the air.  And whilst contested maritime boundaries feature in all A Level specifications, only limited attention is given to geographies of the air that are not specifically physical.  One exception is Edexcel’s mention of air power in its Superpower unit, and even then, it is only made explicit in the context of the costs of maintaining such power:

“7.9 Existing superpowers face ongoing economic restructuring, which challenges their power … b. The economic costs of maintaining global military power (naval, nuclear, air power, intelligence services) and space exploration are questioned in some existing superpowers.” (Edexcel, 2016: 53)

Stretching the definition of air (a mixture of gases that surround a planet) to include the gaps between planets and the definition of geography (study of the earth) to embrace considerations of interactions between humans and outer space has led to an increased range of areas for geographical study, for example the governance of space as a contested ‘commons’ does feature in some resources aimed at A Level students.

Of course, the geography curriculum, especially at secondary school level, is already crowded… so can it afford to take it on?

Conclusion

We feel that geographers should spend some time contemplating how the issues that we discuss above are interdependent and how we might conceive of a more robust and wide-ranging geography of the air that takes it beyond its home in physical geography and meteorology.

In an age of a globally prevalent virus which cannot be seen by the naked eye, it is time for an increased awareness that the invisible is crucial in geography.  The air is a neglected aspect of our discipline which is ‘hiding in plain sight’.

David Alcock (@DavidAlcock1 and www.alcock.blog)

Harvey Logan (@harv_logan and www.theairplanesblog.wordpress.com)

December 2020

References

(Most references are hyperlinked)

Department for Education (2013) Geography programmes of study for England: key stage 3: National Curriculum – Geography key stages 3 and 4 (publishing.service.gov.uk)

Edexcel (2016) GCE A level Geography specification issue 5: https://qualifications.pearson.com/content/dam/pdf/A%20Level/Geography/2016/specification-and-sample-assessments/Pearson-Edexcel-GCE-A-level-Geography-specification-issue-5-FINAL.pdf

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Geographies of the air – hiding in plain sight? Pt 1: Place, Medium and Value

Co-authored with Harvey Logan (@harv_logan / www.theairplanesblog.wordpress.com)

UndergroundPavelCulek

London Underground by Pavel Culek

“Strategy and international politics are influenced strongly by geography”

This is the tantalising and prescient first sentence of Stefan Possony and Leslie Rosenzweig’s article ‘The Geography of the Air’ (1955: 1).  However, within a few lines, it becomes clear that the promise of an examination of the complex relationships between power and aerial geographies is snuffed out, and the remainder of the piece concerns itself with a narrow conception of the geography of air:

“The geography of the air… is the study of the physical differences of the air in various locations and altitudes” (p.1)

This definition, whilst concerning itself with a worthy and longstanding field of study within physical and environmental geography, is, ironically, claustrophobic and airless in its failure to conceive of a wider geography of air.

Below, we sketch out some of the contours of the existing  geographies of air and ponder the extent to which human geography has neglected the potentialities of exploring this theme.  We do not pretend to have carried out an exhaustive study of pre-existing materials or to have employed academic rigour; we merely offer this up as a ‘think piece’, and we welcome feedback!

The human scale – air, odours, and place

“There’s something surreal about plunging into the bowels of the earth to catch a train. It’s a little world of its own down there, with its own strange winds and weather systems, its own eerie noises and oily smells” (Bryson, 1995)

In this vivid description of the London Underground, Bill Bryson takes the reader’s mind’s eye (or is it their mind’s nose?) to an anonymous platform, where they can easily imagine themselves contemplating the history and complexity of the capital’s underbelly.

This snippet also illustrates how a place can be represented multi-dimensionally.  We understand why vision might be the sense that geographers first rely on when trying to understand a place, but sound and smell, let alone the physical sensation of moving air on the skin, deserve more of a look-in, if you excuse the pun.  Mustiness and mildew can indicate that a place is uncared-for, abandoned, and past its prime.  The stench of human and animal excreta can build on this impression.  Smells and noises can be interesting, evocative, and even exciting too.

Indeed, there has been a growing trend to document and explore sensory landscapes in the early years of the 21st Century: psychogeography has experienced somewhat of a renaissance, for example through the writings of Will Self, Iain Sinclair, and Robert MacFarlane.  Reflecting on the positionality of these and other writers, there have also been interesting and crucial discussions about dominant ‘gazes’ in an era in which Geography is finally beginning to open itself up to an authorship more representative of humanity.

Nevertheless, researchers, urbanists, artists and writers have woken up and smelt the coffee: lived realities are not just about dry statistics and about what is seen, but they are also about the fuller sensory experience of a place, including odours and sounds.  A lovely discussion of ‘The sensory landscape of the city’ took place on Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed in January 2018 and is available here.

Smellscaping has risen in prominence as a fieldwork tool in recent years: see, for example, http://goodcitylife.org/smellymaps/ and https://www.geography-fieldwork.org/a-level/place/placemaking/method/#sensory – and as shown in Figure 1, below.  Soundscapes have also recently experienced a similar trajectory.

Aroma Wheel

Figure 1: Aroma Wheel by Kate McLean

Source: Field Studies Council

Air as a medium

It should also be remembered that visual and aural impressions of a place are also transmitted through the medium of air.  Accusations that this is stretching the importance of the air too far are easily countered by pointing out that these impressions are affected by atmospheric conditions – for example, if an observer waits for the cloud to clear before taking a photograph of a Lakeland mountain, then they will be misrepresenting the reality of the place when it was shrouded in fog.  How often do geographers wait until rain, fog, or wind has passed before recording what a place ‘looks’ like?

The role of air as a medium has of course been crucial in the covid-19 pandemic, and beyond the devastating medical and economic impacts of the virus and attempts to combat it, it also opens several research avenues for geographers, from the impact of ‘social distancing’ on hospitality venues and desire lines in parks to the way it has focused attentions on conceptions of ‘fresh air’.

The economic and cultural, and environmental value of air

Geographers are aware of the importance of views and sight lines in both urban and rural areas.  Aesthetics and place attachment are both tied up in these considerations.  Recent consideration of ecosystem services has heightened the importance of views, especially as monetary value is placed upon what can be seen from workplaces, homes, sites of leisure and consumption, and in the journeys in between such places.  A pleasant view, for example, of greenery, can boost property values.  A consideration of the geographies of air must also pay attention to air pollution; such pollution, even more so than water pollution, does not respect borders.

Cultural Geographies of flight

The ability to see the earth from the air was undoubtedly a feat which re-oriented understandings of world Geography.  With the modern ease of accessibility to satellite imagery, the ‘view from above’ is something to which people have become all too accustomed.  In the not too distant past, this new perspective on the planet revolutionised how people understood the world and their place in it.

The lyrical writings of Frenchman Antoine de Saint Exupéry, a pilot for Aéropostale in the early 1900’s, tend towards awe when describing the experience of flight and the viewpoint it afforded on landscapes passing below.  They offer valuable insights into how flying changed our conception of the world:

“Even if a road does venture across a desert, it twists and turns to enjoy the oases […] Flight has brought us knowledge of the straight line.” (Saint Exupéry, 1939, p.33).

The enduring influence of Saint Exupéry’s work highlights how the air has taken on a role as the location in which cultural works are situated.

Alongside wonderment though, geographers ought to consider the extent to which aviation in this period contributed to enshrining colonial ideologies and mindsets.  Flying was an activity reserved for colonial elites and being up in the air was assumed as a position of superiority; their subjects (both the human and natural) could be surveilled below.  Airline advertisements of the time, like the following (Figure 2), reflected this.

Flight Poster

Figure 2: 1919 advertisement for Latécoère (the predecessor to Aéropostale) – regarded as the world’s first airline route map. Moroccans are pictured almost worshiping the arrival of an aircraft resplendent in French insignia

Source: Ovenden and Roberts, 2019

This paper by Lucy Budd considers how the ‘view from the air’ has developed and constructed our understanding of landscapes throughout the history of flight: https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/The_view_from_the_air_the_cultural_geographies_of_flight/9457370

That’s enough hot air for now…

In Part 2, we will mull over aerial militarisation and intensification.  We will also consider what is taught, and what might be taught, about the geographies of air, before asking you to contemplate the ‘place’ of geographies of the air in geographical imaginations and curricula.

David Alcock and Harvey Logan

December 2020

References

Bryson, B (1995) Notes from a Small Island (HarperCollins)

Ovenden, M and Roberts, M (2019). Airline Maps: A Century of Art and Design. (Penguin)

Possony, S T and Rosenzweig, L (1955) The Geography of the Air in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 299, pp1-11

Saint Exupéry, A (1939; Translated 1991). Wind, Sand and Stars. (Penguin)

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Hopeful Education Optimism and progress Uncategorized

Hopeful Education

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is young-people-hope-luke-ellis-craven.jpg
Luke Ellis-Craven, Unsplash https://unsplash.com/photos/_tfFjSyIUZY

“Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up” – David Orr

How should we respond when young people express their worries about the future of the world to us? There is, of course, a need to listen, empathise, and support. But what if the education system can do more than that? What if we can instill hope – active hope – so that our young people can be more confident about the future?

Hopeful Education aims to do just that, by encouraging young people to understand progress, believe in humanity, and help to create a better world. Let’s look at Hopeful Education’s take on these strands.

Progress is a complex notion, but in terms of Hopeful Education, it will be understood as collective social improvement in spheres such as health, education, cooperation, democracy, and prosperity.  Global improvements in all these areas have been recorded in the modern era, with a marked acceleration since 1950, but they are under-appreciated.  Highlighting such improvements often leads to disbelief, warnings of complacency, accusations of naivety, and even accusations of conspiracy with ‘the establishment’.  Some commentators believe that publicising and celebrating progress strengthens the status quo, therefore stifling future progress.  These concerns should be recognised and interrogated, but they should not stifle the public’s understanding of progress.  Hopeful Education encourages learners to engage with and interrogate the notion of progress, understand the gains that have already been made and why they have been made, and use this understanding to inform debates about future progress.

Belief in humanity has been under increasing threat in recent decades.  Humans are social animals, who have thrived largely because they have learned to co-operate, trust, communicate and co-exist with each other.  These qualities are still evident in abundance, but they are under-appreciated and are being eroded by polarising and divisive political and media discourse, both deliberate and subconscious.  Blaming others, accentuating differences rather than similarities, and an over-representation of the negative side of human nature in media output (including social media) has led to a growing mistrust in human nature.  Hopeful Education seeks to reaffirm the potential of human nature to work collectively for the common good, whether that be in the classroom, inter-generationally, locally, nationally, or in the context of global governance and co-operation.

Striving for a better world can, at first glance, be accepted as a given for pretty much everyone in any society, although debate remains as to what constitutes ‘better’, and whether the scope should be restricted to humanity or expanded to cover the whole biosphere.  But – especially for children – admitting that one should strive for a better world can come across as self-evident or cliched at best, and crass or indicative of weakness at worst.  Striving for a better world is also under threat from both a resurgent nationalism and populism, and from a political focus on the economy over the environment or social wellbeing.  It also has a reputation, fostered by some social commentators and politicians, for being vague, hair-shirted, and anti-progress.  Hopeful Education champions and facilitates futures thinking and education for sustainable development, taking these crucibles beyond their current homes in citizenship and geography into the broader educational sphere.

Hopeful Education seeks to understand the reasons for nihilism, mistrust, and complacency, but as an avowedly positive movement it seeks to weaken their influence.

A syncretic approach

The three strands of Hopeful Education are not new, but their combination into a coherent educational movement is novel and potentially powerful.  Hopeful Education has been informed by a variety of influences, both from within and beyond the world of education.  This syncretic approach has its strengths, as it brings together, and builds upon, ideas which may have never been combined in this way before.  However, as Hopeful Education develops, inconsistencies, contradictions and gaps will emerge, and it will prompt a myriad of philosophical questions.  These should be viewed as strengths, a source of vibrancy, and a basis for deliberation, rather than as weaknesses.

A new type of hope

Names are powerful, and the choice of the name Hopeful Education was a long journey.  The author used alternative titles such Optimistic Education in some of his writings in 2018-2020, reflecting his personal worldview.  But this was felt to be too prescriptive, and its apparent complacency put it in danger of overshadowing the significant problems and threats faced by humanity and the planet.  Other names were also considered – see this blog post for more on this.  The author is fully aware of the body of educational literature based around the ‘pedagogy of hope’, inspired by Paolo Freire’s 1992 book of that title (republished in 2004), and including more recent additions such as ‘Educating for Hope’ by David Hicks (2014).  Hopeful Education shares some of the philosophy of the pedagogy of hope, for instance the belief that inequality and injustice should be challenged, that educating for hope should be interdisciplinary, and that it is a collective pursuit.  However, it differs in that many writers on the pedagogy of hope seem to overlook or dismiss the gains made by humankind in recent decades.  There is also sometimes, ironically, a sceptical view of human nature, and the language used in some of the output could be accused of fostering anxiety.  As the Hopeful Education movement develops, the author looks forward to engaging with adherents of a pedagogy of hope, and he trusts that his use of the root word ‘hope’ will be taken as a homage rather as a co-option or dilution of a ‘pedagogy of hope’.

Hope, progress and optimism

Hopeful Education chimes with the claims of the one of the key proponents of the pedagogy of hope – David Orr – who wrote that “Realistic hope… requires us to check our optimism at the door and enter the future without illusions” (Orr, 2009: 185).  Elsewhere, Orr has opined that “Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up” (Orr, 2008) – which sits comfortably with Hopeful Education – but in the very next sentence he goes on to show why at least his conception of a pedagogy of hope diverges from that of Hopeful Education: “I don’t know any reason to be optimistic now, or to predict great success for the human species” (ibid).  Whilst Hopeful Education recognises environmental and social challenges, Orr’s bleak statement is in opposition to the first strand of Hopeful Education: it encourages learners to engage with and interrogate the notion of progress, understand the gains that have already been made and why they have been made, and use this understanding to inform debates about future progress.

Vision 2050: the fruits of Hopeful Education

What would the world look like in 2050 if its citizens had undertaken a Hopeful Education?

  • People would be able to make more reasoned judgements and action, leading to more effective individual, corporate, and government decision-making
  • People would be less fearful and stressful, resulting in a better place in which to live and to foster future generations, measured by wellbeing and health metrics
  • People would be more emboldened to take action to resolve the remaining challenges, secure in knowledge that other challenges have been overcome: “When we have a fact-based worldview, we can see that the world is not as bad as it seems – and we can see what we have to do to keep making it better” (Rosling et al, 2018, Factfulness)
  • People would have more chance to examine, and act on, local issues, as they will have contextualised global trends

In the spirit of openness, it is worth considering some of the challenges which a realisation of this vision might bring: one is that such a world might be more complacent (leading to a reduction in efforts towards realising a better world), and another is that it might become more parochial.  Also, one of the assumptions behind this vision is that the world will have experienced a continuation of the current trends in terms of human development – which is possible, but not certain, to occur.

The project begins

Achieving such a worldview will take a monumental, long-term, and multi-pronged approach.  Education will play a crucial role.   It has the power to instil hope comprehensively, and at a time of life when opinions and critical thinking are being formed.  It will not be able to succeed alone: some ideas for how a hopeful worldview might be possible outside of the world of formal education will be given due consideration, and it will be important to bear these in mind when cohesive strategies are being developed.  But Hopeful Education is where this project begins.

In my next post I will offer some ideas as to how Hopeful Education could be enacted. In the meantime, please do contact me in the comments below or via @DavidAlcock1 on Twitter. Thank you.

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Optimism and progress

Creating stronger post-covid communities, one act at a time

StaySafeGlasgowArtBBCGetty

Covid-era street art in a Glasgow shop window

Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-52646104

We are living in a covid-19 twilight zone.  The certainty and clarity of the ‘stay home, protect the NHS, save lives’ message already seems to belong to a different era.  Instead, we are now encouraged to ‘stay alert’ whilst we return to something approaching normality, where we can enjoy a trip to the pub or the shops, or to plan a holiday.  As we move incrementally back to our old ways, we should take stock of what has happened and what is happening.

The virus itself has of course led to human suffering, and the government’s responses to it have caused inconvenience at best and misery at worst.  The economy has taken the biggest hit since the bursting of the South Sea Bubble in 1720, education has been disrupted, social lives have been shattered, and sports have been hit for six.

The psychological impacts are only just being assessed: who knows what the long-term effects will be, not only of bereavement, but of joblessness, money, and housing worries?  On a personal note, as well as having vulnerable older relatives and a nephew who is being shielded, the education and socialisation of my children as well as those whom I teach has been disrupted.

But as restrictions loosen, many of us are already beginning to miss some aspects of life under lockdown.  I wrote in April that many neighbourhoods have bonded more than ever before, as people have ventured out for walks and bike rides or have stayed out for a chat after the weekly clap for carers.  Local environments are quieter and cleaner, and roads are safer.

As someone who lives just three miles away from Leeds-Bradford Airport, we had become used to the background aircraft noise, but once it disappeared, the atmosphere now seems more peaceful.  As a result, birdsong in recent months has been especially vibrant.  To complement this – although it’s nothing like the dramatic differences seen in cities in the emerging world, such as Delhi and Shanghai – the skies are clearer and have fewer contrails.

Plenty has been written about the stresses and strains of spending more time under the same roof with one’s family or housemates – and I am under no illusion that such pressures can, and have, led to an increase in domestic abuse.  But many households will have enjoyed pastimes together, bonded over more mealtimes, and even had the luxury of talking to each other more often.

Granted, we have been unable, until recently, to visit our relatives outside of Yorkshire, from our new nephew in Stafford, our new niece in Manchester, or my wife’s 90-year-old grandma in Norfolk.  But many familial bonds have arguably – and perhaps ironically – been strengthened by this enforced distancing, with phone calls occurring more frequently and the advent of video chats bringing many of us closer together.

OtleyParkManningStainton

Parks – like Wharfe Meadows in Otley – have become havens in these uncertain times

Source: https://manningstainton.co.uk/leeds/best-places-to-live-in-leeds#

Opportunities to exercise for all but the most vulnerable groups have arisen, and we are lucky that our local authorities have largely avoided closures of parks and other green spaces.  Although I will look forward to enjoying more distant national parks and other outdoor spaces when restrictions ease, I have explored many local forests, parks, and moorland areas both with my family and as a cyclist.  Local roads have also been quiet enough to take young children on, or alongside.

These are the things that I will miss when they disappear.  But will they disappear?  The good news is that they might not: the post-covid future has not happened yet.  We can all play a part in shaping it.  Our individual choices in how to live, how to travel, what to do and how to interact with others will all add up.

I suffer from FOMO – fear of missing out.  This has led me to cram my diary with a ballooning list of engagements.  This continued after the arrival of children: I felt that I had to take them to different places and to sign them up to various activities, so that they wouldn’t ‘miss out’.  I agreed to virtually anything that came up, squeezing out valuable family ‘down time’ and the chance to engage with my locality.

One of my post-covid resolutions is to maintain this degree of connection with my local area, and to disabuse myself of the notion that the grass is always greener on the other side.  As well as having personal benefits, this resolution fits in with a broader vision of the development of a more cohesive, active, and greener – some might say sustainable – community.

It’s just a small commitment, but as we emerge blinking into the challenging late-covid world, perhaps we could all take the opportunity to choose one thing – and persevere with it.  If we do, our communities could become stronger, our lives more fulfilled, and the future just that little bit brighter.

Categories
Outdoor Learning Uncategorized

It might just take a nudge to cycle to work

canal bike

Canals can make the cycle to work more pleasant

Source: https://www.active-traveller.com/cycle-routes/cycle-route-dove-valley-trail-yorkshire

Every journey starts with one small step.  Occasionally you need a nudge to take that step.  An old housemate of mine gave me that nudge over a decade ago.

I had been driving to my previous teaching job, six miles from my old house, as a matter of habit: every weekday I would jump in the car, drive off and arrive at school.  Then I would drive back.  And then I would often go to the gym, or for a run, or a swim, sometime in the evening.  Sure, I had a bike, but I barely used it.

My housemate used to cycle to his work place and suggested that I try it too.  And one sunny summer’s day I did.  But what a kerfuffle – I had to take a suit and my shirt to school the previous day, then go in, shower, get changed, then start my working day.  Then there’s the hassle at the end of the school day too.  Was it really all worth it?

Time saving

But the weird thing is that, in my case at least (I live just over five miles from my place of work), once I put a few simple things in place, cycling to work actually saved me time.  Why is that?

  • Thanks to good old traffic congestion, I take the same time to cycle in as it takes other teachers in my area to drive in (not that I am trying to be smug about it – more of that later…)
  • I keep suits, shoes, towels and so on at work, and replace them on rotation or when I occasionally get the train in
  • I shower at school – but I would have showered at home anyway – so that’s time neutral!
  • I no longer have to have a separate training session when I get home – the commute (and extended versions if necessary) is the baseline of my exercise regime

Other benefits

Apart from time saving, the benefits are manifold:

  • fitness
  • fresh air (half of my route is off the main road)
  • resilience (getting through the odd cold or rainy journey builds up your defences for some of life’s minor inconveniences)
  • a feeling of belonging (swapping pleasantries with other cyclists and the same friendly old fellow on his canalside constitutional)
  • money-saving (we are now a one-car household, saving money on buying, servicing, taxing, and fuelling a second vehicle – and no more gym fees – and many employers offer the Cycle to Work scheme so you can buy a bike from your pre-tax income, and stagger the payments throughout the year)
  • doing your little bit to reduce carbon dioxide emissions
  • giving you an extra leisure activity to do in your own time
  • the ability to eat more food and ‘earning’ the odd beer or two

Yes, I might sound smug, but smugness is an occupational hazard of a cycle commuter!  (Give me a virtual slap in the face if you wish.)

Let’s go back to that small step – the first day I biked to my old school.  Things soon got into a routine. I went from biking once a week, to twice, then three times.  I cycle every day.

Barriers and how to overcome them

There will be barriers to overcome.  These can include living far away from your place of work, dropping off children on the way to and from school/nursery (there are ways to do this!), lacking a bike, worries about safety, concerns about your fitness levels, anxieties about frosty or wet journeys… and more.  Why not chat to people who already bike in about these barriers and how they can be broken down?

Also, advice can be found on the British Cycling website, and in terms of safety, none of us are immune to the dangers of cycling, but they can be overstated, and awareness of risk probabilities will help you to put them in perspective.

Moreover, I believe that the risks are outweighed by the mental and physical health benefits of cycling.  Some unions will support you in the case of accidents which might take place on your commute – and you could seek extra cover from British Cycling or other providers.

Cycle path YEP

Cycle paths can facilitate your commute

Source: https://www.yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk/business/new-cycling-route-between-leeds-and-castleford-approved-135924

My journey started with a small step.  What will nudge you to take yours?  Could it be the lighter traffic we are seeing in these times of remote working?  Could it be worries about public transport?  The need to save money and get fit?  If you are able to, why not do a Tebbit and get on your bike?  (If you live far away, trains have space for bikes and you could bike the first or last part of your journey.)

Read on for some hints and tips if your interest has been piqued…

Route planning

  • Try a weekend recce of your journey – you could even make it into an expedition with your family or friends
  • Ask someone who already cycle-commutes for suggestions as to the best way to come (the safest and most enjoyable route may not be the shortest or the one that your smart phone suggests)
  • Canals are much safer from the point of view of accidents, but can be quiet places, so consider cycling with a friend for safety
  • Make use of cycle lanes (especially traffic-free ones)
  • This route planner might help

Start with small steps

  • Share your commitment: complete your first few commutes (or part of them) with someone else
  • Start out one-way (use the train to go one-way), or even come part of the way by train
  • Start in summer, so you are cycling in the light

Be safe, be seen!

  • Wear high-visibility clothing and a helmet
  • Dismount and walk your bike on the pavement if needed
  • Keep your eyes peeled and your ears free (no headphones – unless they are bone conduction, and even then it pays to be hyper-aware!)
  • Take a fully charged phone with you

Logistics

  • Keep a heavy bike lock at work, or in your chosen bike cubby hole (ask other cyclists for their hints)
  • Keep your clothes and a towel in a locker
  • Wrap things in a waterproof container in your cycling bag

Just in case

  • Consider cycling insurance – e.g. from British Cycling – or, as I mentioned before, some unions may cover you for your commute

Generic resources

There are many generic resources to help cyclists to plan a safe journey.

One starting point for absolute novices is Bikeability – the government’s cycling initiative: https://bikeability.org.uk

Tips for more experienced cyclists can be found here (from British Cycling): https://www.britishcycling.org.uk/membership/article/20140102-Road-safety-tips-for-members-0
Phew!  That’s it for now.  As Michael McIntyre says, stay safe…

Best wishes,  David

 

Categories
Geography Optimism and progress

Can we be less hyper about mobility?

hypermobility

Sustainable transport: a walk in the park? – Source: Wikimedia

“Would you like to live in a cleaner, safer, healthier, friendlier, more beautiful, more democratic, sustainable world in which you know your neighbours and it is safe for your children to play in the street?”

That is the question which geographer John Adams posed in 2001.  It would be difficult to find anyone who would answer in the negative.  But the situation is complicated by its flipside:

“Would you like a car, unlimited air miles and a capacity to travel anywhere you would like to?”

Until very recently, it would have been extremely tempting to answer in the affirmative.  More capacity to travel would mean that we could enjoy more holidays and see more of our family and friends in far-flung places, wouldn’t it?  More exposure to different people and cultures from around the world would also have cultural benefits: travel broadens the mind.  Foreign exchanges, spells of working abroad, and other travels have certainly widened my horizons, and future generations would surely benefit from similarly mind-opening journeys.  Most economists would add that with our ‘tourist pounds’, we are able to spread the benefits of economic growth all over the world.

2 fig 8 air travel

A mind-opening journey to Montserrat – Source: Author

But Adams pointed out that if we live in a world in which everyone’s wish for more travel is granted, then life will become more challenging for everyone, and especially so for the poor and disenfranchised.  His especial beef was with the increasing propensity for people to travel further, faster, more frequently, and more excessively than ever before – a trend he called ‘hypermobility’.

The impacts of hypermobility

One of Adams’s concerns was the environmental cost of excessive travel.  I share those concerns, and I cycle to work and limit my flying to once every couple of years, as my contribution to allaying them.  But as an optimist, I look forward to an era with unlimited ‘green’ energy, therefore in a generation or so, his concerns about pollution should, I hope, become baseless.

However, regardless of the environmental costs of travel, Adams argued convincingly that a world in which more people can travel where they want and when they want, would be “dangerous, ugly, bleak, crime-ridden, alienated, anonymous, undemocratic [and] socially polarized”.

His overriding worry was that vast numbers of people moving around in sealed-off bubbles to ever more distant places threatens social cohesion.  Physically removing people from each other makes us feel less community-minded and therefore less likely to act in ways which contribute towards the common good.

Was Adams whistling in the wind?  Twenty years after his call to curtail ‘hypermobility’, outside of a handful of cities in affluent countries, there have been few signs of a significant shift in ‘car culture’ anywhere in the world… until recent weeks.

Window of opportunity

Perhaps a new window of opportunity has been opened which may allow us to reverse the trend of hypermobility.  People across the world have begun to get used to different ways of life in recent weeks, including working from home and limiting the journeys we make to undertake exercise.

There are more people than usual exercising in neighbourhood streets and open spaces.  This seems paradoxical – in a lockdown, surely the opposite would be true?  But without gyms to visit and with trips to beauty spots discouraged, many people are exploring the areas near to their homes.  Might we have had a taste of a more sustainable future?

Yes, our encounters with each other have been awkward – a kind of coronavirus sidestep takes place to keep two metres of distance between us.  However, the exchange of smiles, nods and friendly words has been heartening after hours cooped up indoors.  And then there’s the joy of seeing friends and neighbours out on their perambulation, as well as the intangible benefit of connecting with one’s local ‘turf’.

I see vast potential in continuing with some of these ways of life after the lockdown is loosened.  I am not alone – the AA President, Edmund King, says that the coronavirus crisis will change the way that we live, work and travel, and that some of the money earmarked for road infrastructure could instead be channelled into enhancing broadband provision to help home working.

Melbourne

The walkable city – Source: Academy of urbanism

And planners from Jan Gehl to Jeff Speck have lauded the concept of the ‘walkable city’.  Their research shows that small exchanges with others – whether they are strangers or friends, colleagues or shop-workers – give life a much-needed lift and an indefinable buzz to our everyday life.

Worthwhile sacrifices?

Cutting back on our excessive use of transport would sacrifice some of the benefits of frequent travel, but is this not worthwhile in order, as Adams put it, to “protect and enhance what we value in nature and our relations with friends and neighbours”?  Community cohesion would improve, our streets would be safer, and our planet would thank us.  It wouldn’t be easy, as it would come up against great opposition.  However:

“To question the benefits of hypermobility is not to deny freedom and choice. It is to ask people what it is that they really, really want, and to confront them with the fact that their choices have consequences beyond the primary objects of their desires. Collective self-discipline is the wise exercise of freedom and choice.” (Adams, 2001: 10)

Twenty years after the idea was first floated, it’s finally time to become less hyper about mobility.

References:

Adams (2001) The Social Consequences of Hypermobility – RSA lecture, 21 November 2001.  Script available at john-adams.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2006/hypermobilityforRSA.pdf

Gehl, J. (n.d.) www.gehlpeople.com

Geographical Association (n.d.) Responses to Hypermobility https://www.geography.org.uk/Responses-to-Hypermobility

Harrabin, R. (2020) Coronavirus will transform UK work and travel, says AA – BBC News website, 3 April: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-52137968

Speck, J. (n.d.) www.jeffspeck.com

Categories
Geography Outdoor Learning Teaching and Learning

Education and entertainment? Occupying children in challenging times

Outdoor learning photo

Source: Shutterstock.com, via https://theconversation.com/being-in-nature-is-good-for-learning-heres-how-to-get-kids-off-screens-and-outside-104935 

There has been a boom in advice for parents and guardians over the last few days about what they can do with their children for the upcoming weeks – and probably months – off school.  In my position as a geography teacher, outdoor educator, orienteering coach, and father of two young children, I have some experience at knowing what might work well, and in what context.  Please find below some thoughts and suggestions on how to combine educating and entertaining your children in and around the home in these challenging times.

The basics

Work within the structure that your children’s school has put in place for remote working.  One of the reasons why most school days are divided into different lessons of between 35 and 60 minutes in duration, is because learning, and especially learning in childhood, is more effective in short bursts and when it is ‘interleaved‘, i.e. with learners encountering different subjects and topics throughout the school day, week and term.  But be aware that in a school-based day, children ‘depressurise’ between lessons by chatting to their friends whilst they physically move around the school site; you could replicate this by allowing them 5 minutes to contact their friends and/or to move around (see below for some really short ideas).

Interleaving

Source: https://www.learningscientists.org/interleaving

Children thrive on variety, and this might mean doing several activities in one day – perhaps interspersed by periods of playing educational and not-so-educational computer games and watching CBeebies/CBBC/YouTube (delete as appropriate!).

Be flexible: be willing to go off on a tangent if your child takes you on one!

Keep it simple.  Younger children in particular can let their imagination run wild with things as simple as chalk, clean paintbrushes and den-building materials – see below for some easy ideas.

Don’t splash the cash.  You don’t need to spend lots of money: use your school or public library if it is still open, visit charity shops, and where possible, share toys, books and other materials with other families, taking care to disinfect them if necessary.

Use technology judiciously.  Although your children may not like to admit it, they will probably be overdosing on it.  This is not only because most schools will be expecting your child to use technology to receive, undertake and submit work, but also because in place of face-to-face socialising in school, your children will probably want to use social media even more frequently than usual.

Make the most of mealtimes together, and build preparation into your time together (see below).  My children are on the fussier end of the spectrum, so eating together can be a frustrating experience, but at least we have time to talk about things and you might even wheedle out some of their worries (coronavirus included).

Now we have covered some of the basics, what about some practical ideas?

Outdoors

Some people will be able to leave the house, as long as they maintain social distancing protocols – the main one of which is to stay about 2m from other people.  And, most of the time in spring and summer, the increasingly clement weather and lighter days should facilitate this.  The summer term is when many schools run outdoor learning activities and field trips, and the current shutdown means that children are in danger of missing out on these valuable opportunities.  It is important to keep the outdoor flame burning – in all its inquisitive, active, resilience-building, messy, muddy, invigorating glory.  (Inspired by Nicholas Tampio, I reflect on why face-to-face learning works here.)

Some of the simplest ideas for the youngest children in your household involve art – for example, paintbrushes dipped in water provide a surprisingly entertaining distraction, and investing in jumbo chalks gives children free rein over your patio and walls:

Chalk drawing

For older children, why not inspire them into producing outdoor artworks in the style of Andy Goldsworthy?  The Art department at Bradford Grammar School develop this idea in the annual Year 9 Outdoor Learning Day:

image4

Easy activities, like gardening, can be tailored into learning opportunities.  These activities include the building of a ‘bug hotel’, and planting bulbs (it’s not too late for some varieties) and vegetables.  The RSPB – which nowadays has a remit which has spread towards the conservation of all wildlife – has many great ideas on their website.  If this inspires you, then it is good to know that anyone can join the RSPB at a subscription rate of your own choice, after which you will receive a folder of activities to do in any season, plus one of two age-appropriate quarterly children’s magazines containing other activities.

The time is also ripe for children in Key Stages 1-3 in particular to undertake many of the zany activities developed by the Mission:Explore collective.  Some of their books and ideas are available to download for free on websites such as this one or this one, or to buy on Amazon.  Their Facebook page and Twitter account contain archives of many of their activities.  One example is below:

Mission Explore image

The Scout Association are, of course, experts at outdoor learning, and this page contains hundreds of outdoor ideas, sortable by time, cost and group size:

Great Outdoors

Going out for a walk in the local park or woods may be enough to stimulate your children – and those of any age will need little prompting to make dens or dam brooks.  It has been proven that spending time in green spaces – and especially forests – is great for mental health.  One way of embracing this opportunity is to undertake walking meditation – or what some Buddhists call ‘forest bathing’.  Bradford Grammar students have tried this in the last two outdoor learning days:

image2

To introduce more intellectual challenge into such trips, why not find and print an orienteering map of these areas, and use it to plan your way around routes of increasing complexity.  There are hundreds of so-called ‘permanent orienteering courses’, with posts to visit – some of which have QR codes to scan to prove you have been to each location – and to add to the challenge, why not run them?  See the British Orienteering website for more information.

POC QR tree

There are more outdoor learning ideas in the Outdoor Classroom Day website – and in some of my earlier blog posts, such as this one.  Finally, the ‘hive mind’ of the Bradford Grammar School staff helped in the collection of outdoor learning activities covered here.

Indoors

Much of the day will, either by choice or necessity, be spent indoors.

Simple pleasures such as reading, practising a musical instrument, or jigsaws, will undoubtedly see a rise in popularity in the coming weeks.  The art of letter-writing, perhaps to an elderly relative, or to friends, may well make a comeback too.

There should be more time for meal planning and preparation in the coming weeks too.  Making a pizza dough, then leaving it to rise, then knocking it back, adding toppings, then putting it in the oven, then waiting again for it to cook, is an easy way to engage children in the structure (and fun) of cooking, as well as teaching them patience!  Older children could also benefit from some home economics practice as part of their move towards independence.

What could pupils do to fill the gaps between lessons, aside from engaging in social media?  Rationing mobile phone usage may well be the best policy, as evidence shows that even having a phone in one’s field of vision can reduce productivity.  So what about those low-tech activities?  Picking up a new physical skill in small doses may be worthwhile – I remember learning to juggle in the five-minute gaps between revision for my GCSEs back in the ’90s!  Engaging in an intense intellectual activity such as a crossword could also be an outlet for older students: more able ones could even learn the art of the cryptic crossword.

As well as their outdoor provision, The Scouts have produced a section on their website called ‘The Great Indoors’, containing over a hundred ideas.  See below:

Great Indoors

For those looking to model real-world phenomena and processes, I recommend a web search for ‘kitchen geography’.  Have a look at this video, for instance, which recreates glacial erosion in your own home!

There will be other people with more experience than me in the arena of arts, crafts and music-making, so I will leave my suggestions here for now.

Good luck, and I hope to be able to put more out there in the coming weeks.  As ever, I welcome your thoughts.

David

 

Categories
Geography Teaching and Learning

Don’t cut corners, take short cuts!

Primary School Students Raising Hands

Classroom calm.  Source: www.scholastic.com 

“Forget the lectures, this is what you really need to know about teaching”.

I still remember it clearly.  I was part of a group of trainee teachers, at the start of our PGCE course.  We spent half an hour in a DT classroom with a plain-speaking teacher who had been briefed to tell us about how to approach the basics of teaching.  I am afraid I forget his name.  Let’s call him Mr Practical.

Mr Practical said he had worked in industry for a few years then he switched to teaching and had been doing so for nine years.  He said something about nine years being a long time.  Well, I am writing this after spending almost double that length of time and some days I know how it feels!  Anyway, back to the session…

Mr Practical got out a pile of books and a variety of pieces of stationery.  Then he used these as props whilst he rattled through the practicalities of classroom management.  Vygotsky and Piaget could wait.  This is what us ‘new kids’ urgently needed, and Mr Practical knew it!

I am happy to admit that I still make elemental bloopers in my classroom teaching and I pick up hints all of the time.  But thinking back to that session, there are plenty of short cuts to effective teaching in a classroom scenario that I have taken with me.  Sometimes I have gone too far – I have cut corners.  The semantic difference is slight – but crucial.

Cutting corners either short-changes the students, or adds stress on you further down the line, or inconveniences someone else.  Or all three.  Short cuts are about effective practice, freeing you up to teach!

So, in a homage to Mr Practical, and as a way of ‘passing in on’, here are some ways of cutting corners which should be avoided, and some short cuts which you might like to try instead.

Cutting Corners

Short Cuts
Go for the ‘easy option’ of getting the answer from those with their hands-up. Have a (temporary?) ‘hands-down’ policy, or, more straightforwardly, just target a variety of students, so that by the end of the lesson, no-one has been missed out.
Assume all homework has been done.  Until you find out later in the day that it hasn’t.  The cheeky rascals! Open books at the homework page and tour the class to check before they hand it in.  You can ask questions whilst doing this!
Assume you’ll be able to find the right page in their books to mark. Get the students to hand their books in with the pages open at the relevant task, or with a ‘bookmark’ (this could be a flash card which they could update periodically with tricky terms).
Hand out gluesticks/scissors willy-nilly (you will come unstuck, ha ha). Get a ‘keeno’ to be the glue stick/scissor monitor.  Yes, even in Year 11.
Issue mini whiteboards, pens and wipes separately. Bag them up.  Or leave a whole set in a desk tidy for every lesson.
Not doing the register until mid-way through.  Screw convention and regimentation, I occasionally think – but you will have the school secretarial team on your back! Have a seating plan (apart from at A Level).  This will allow you to easily notice any absentees, and you can ask another student if the absentee is on their way or not.  Then you can freeze your display screen and do your blasted register.
Avoid ‘knowledge retrieval’ tests as they are too much hassle and require more copying. Give pupils scraps of old paper, make them verbal, multiple choice, and get them to peer mark.   Or at least make them A5 or A6 size and store them in an envelope in the back of their books.
Get pupils to move around the room every lesson in a bid to keep them active. Make this a treat.  Order and routine are important.  Rather than getting them to move to different stations, pass the sheets around instead – this provides mild entertainment, stimulation and a sense of expectation.
Assume that textbook exercises are doable and indeed logical. Attempt them at home or at least think them through first.  Keep your answer sheet; next time you will have a ‘short cut’ to the answers.
Don’t change your practice. Observe other lessons.  Talk to other teachers.  Get hints online.

More hints – which could be called ‘short cuts’ but which are really just good practice – can be found in this post about how to respond to your students’ desire for help without giving them the answer or stifling their curiosity.

I am, of course, open to suggestions for more – and of criticism (see the last row in the table)!

David

 

 

Categories
Geography Optimism and progress

Population matters – and so does critical thinking

I was going to get all hot and bothered and write a polemical post on ‘humanity bashing’.

I had made the assumption that Chris Packham’s documentary ‘7.7 billion and counting’, which was recently aired on the BBC was misanthropic.  I had read about its wilder claims online as well as in the printed media – such as in my father-in-law’s copy of the Radio Times (Buerk, 2020).  I feared a dredging up of 1970s-style fears such as a ‘population time bomb’ (see photo below).  My optimistic mindset was also rankled at reading statements such as Packham’s belief that Lagos is “pre-apocalypse Earth”, which was quoted in the same article.

time bomb radio times clip

Fig.1: Excerpt from Radio Times preview of ‘7.7 billion and counting’ (18-24 Jan 2020 issue)

I was ready to mount a defence of humanity against the onslaught of pessimism.  At the start of the show, I hovered my thumb over a blank tweet, ready to release a tide of optimism onto an unsuspecting internet… or at least onto my small band of followers.

Misanthropy and the ‘human-sceptic’ narrative

Discussions about population control in the context of sustainability should of course take place, but, in the absence of a fuller awareness of demography and global progress, they can stray into dangerous territory – a turning of humanity against itself.

A number of instances in the weeks preceding the documentary had persuaded me that misanthropy in one form or another is still alive and well.  The letters page of the Yorkshire Post, for example, hinted at harsh solutions to the supposed ‘population crisis’:

YP comments

Figure 2: Yorkshire Post, 20 Jan 2020

Comments on an otherwise moderate Facebook thread about environmental action had also taken me aback:

Sterilisation comments from Facebook Figure 3: Facebook thread (screenshot by author, Jan 2020)

Closer to home, whilst talking with a teaching colleague about the environment, he said “What no-one seems to talk about is the elephant in the room.”  I queried him: “Do you mean climate change?”.  “No” he said, “overpopulation”.  I didn’t want to press him as to what he felt the next logical stage would be to solve this problem; I feared his response.

Even David Attenborough, a patron of Population Matters, and someone I hugely respect, feeds into this ‘human-sceptic’ narrative: he is quoted on their website as saying:

“All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people, and harder – and ultimately impossible – to solve with ever more people.”

A commonly raised concern is that if population reaches a certain level, then ‘limits to growth’ are reached and either the environment or society – or possibly both – suffers.  This is the essence of Malthusianism.  Thomas Malthus argued in 1798 that population tends to increase faster than the supply of resources needed to sustain it.  Despite being disproved in almost all scenarios – as Amartya Sen points out, most modern famines, for example, are not due to a decline in the availability of food, but rather to a restriction in food supplies – Malthusianism persists.  The misanthropy that Malthusianism fosters is dangerous for anyone who is interested in human flourishing and progress.

Population control can be used as an excuse to subjugate the world’s poor.  It can be used an excuse to reduce immigration.  It can be used as an excuse to reduce aid budgets.  It also contributes towards an anti-progress narrative: in ‘Factfulness’, Hans Rosling recounted how a student told him “They [people in developing and emerging countries] can’t live like us.  We can’t let them continue developing like this.  Their emissions will kill the planet” (2018: 214).  Rosling countered this by noting “how easily we in the West seem to shift responsibility away from ourselves and onto others.  We say that ‘they’ cannot live like us.  The right thing to say is, ‘We cannot live like us” (ibid: 215).

In the more distant past, famine has even been welcomed as an effective method for keeping numbers down: sources quote the British civil servant responsible for Ireland, Sir Charles Trevelyan, as saying that the great famine in the 1840s was an “effective mechanism for reducing surplus population”.

So as I sat down to watch the documentary, I thought I would be confronted with a barrage of pessimism; an onslaught of doom-mongering.  My thumb hovered expectantly.

Trying hard to keep an open mind

But I was determined to try to watch the programme with an open mind.

It didn’t begin well: Chris Packham drew a graph showing population rising exponentially, stopping at 2020, with the unspoken implication being that it was due to carry on rising as the same rate.  Below is a very similar graph, from the website of Population Matters, which Chris Packham is a patron of:

Historical human population growth - Pop Matters

Figure 4: Historic population growth.  Source: Population Matters

A slightly more even-handed graph might have been one like the one below, which shows the most recent median projections from the United Nations, superimposed with a line graph showing a drastically slowing growth rate:

Population growth UN Figure 5: Historic population growth and median projection.  Source: Our World in Data

Packham also spoke about being “terrified” about the future of his step-child and of humanity in general, and the whole programme lacked sufficient context in terms of the great strides that have been made, especially since the 1950s, in almost all aspects of human development, ranging from healthcare to education, and living standards to human rights, which are covered in ‘Factfulness’, as well as ‘Progress’ by Johan Norberg (2017) and ‘Enlightenment Now’ by Steven Pinker (2018),  and which I have written about here and in Alcock (2019a, 2019b).

It also came as no surprise that the local environmental improvements that are sometimes seen as countries enter later stages of development (cleaner air and water, peak car use, energy efficiencies, and so on) were not mentioned.

Common ground

However, as the programme progressed, and the views of a range of demographers and other experts were aired, I began to note some areas of common ground with Packham (and indeed with Population Matters):

  • We concur that humans are “adaptable and resilient” (Packham’s words), although I feel that more attention could have been paid to the lessons from history, which show us that humanity responds to the imminent reaching of apparent ‘limits to growth’ being more innovative in terms of technology (one thinks of the Simon vs Ehrlich debate, and the findings of Ester Boserup and Ruth de Fries (2014)) or governance (e.g. fishing quotas, bans and emissions trading systems).
  • We recognise that fertility rates (the number of births per woman) are lower than they ever have been, and are forecast to fall further
  • We both believe that fertility rates should fall if we want to have a sustainable future for the world.  However, pinning a number on the ideal ‘fertility rate’ is difficult, because if it drops too quickly then we are left with another type of demographic ‘time bomb’ – that of an ageing population with too few people to support them
  • We agree that access to education, and access to contraception, are crucial elements in reducing fertility rates.  Both policies have health, human rights and well-being benefits too
  • We agree that alleviating poverty is a key way of bringing fertility rates down.  Some analyses of the Chinese one-child policy show that most of the reduction in fertility rates which took place in the years of its operation would have happened anyway, as more prosperous families tend to have fewer children.  However, I would go further and promote the increase of living standards in developing and emerging countries to those experienced in the western world, in order to achieve an even more rapid fall in fertility

I am also heartened that Population Matters has dropped or modified many, if not yet all, of its most misanthropic policies.  These include campaigning to restrict the flow of refugees to the UK, and its PopOffsets scheme to ‘offset’ carbon emissions by funding family planning schemes in the developing world, which was criticised as being condescending and of enabling affluent polluters to assuage their guilt (the latter criticism can be applied to carbon offsetting, which I defend as a short-term measure here).

Incidentally, calm and rational examination of the role of demographics in shaping a sustainable future for our planet may help to assuage one of my other concerns: that too much guilt is being heaped upon members of the public to encourage them to make radical lifestyle choices.  I fear that the pressure on individuals to ‘do something’ can result in eco-anxiety, and wider issues such as demographics require more attention in both academic and popular discourse.  I would have been even happier if I had seen more emphasis on the role that governments can play in terms of nudging and legislating towards policies such as reducing meat consumption and promoting energy efficiencies and environmentally-friendly energy generation.

A truce – but what now?

Throughout the documentary, I was in communication with a Population Matters spokesperson, and by the end of it, I tweeted that I had reached somewhat of a truce with them.  We have more beliefs in common than those which divide us.  So where does that leave me now that I am a little less hot and bothered?  Here are a few points I have been chewing on in recent days:

Approaching issues with an open-mind is crucial, as is sensibly engaging with people who may have an opinion which differs from yours.

It is important to take previews with a pinch of salt: they are designed to hook media consumers into watching or listening certain content.  Previews will latch on to the most extreme parts of a message to try to attract our attention.  The media will not easily change their ways: as Hans Rosling et al put it in ‘Factfulness’, “I cannot see even the highest-quality news outlets conveying a neutral and nondramatic representative picture of the world… It would be correct but just too boring” (2018: p.253).

Critical media engagement is a crucial skill which could and should be taught.  We particularly need a way of engaging with social media consumers which will encourage people to respond more critically with output relating to the environment and human progress.  On an individual basis, this means following the ‘rules of thumb’ outlined in ‘Factfulness’ – and summarised here – but I go further than Rosling.  He says “it is up to us as consumers to learn how to consume the news more factfully” and “it is not the goal of activists or politicians to present the world as it really is” (p.253).  However, I think that it is crucial that alongside individual changes in behaviour, we should also move towards governmental, corporate and educational initiatives to ingrain media literacy and critical thinking among the widest possible section of society.  The time is right for this.  As Bobby Duffy wrote in The Perils of Perception:

“While we shouldn’t think there was ever an age of perfectly neutral information, we also shouldn’t kid ourselves: we’re travelling towards a world where disinformation has more opportunity to be created and travel faster” (2018: 237).

I am working on such a project at the moment.  This, I believe, is one of the great issues of the media-saturated and uncertain world of the 2020s.  Without such a push, I fear a proliferation of the already worrying amount of comments which tend towards the extremes – such as those noted earlier from Facebook and the Yorkshire Post – and the insidious growth of unspoken feelings which go against the greater good.

It is possible to reinvigorate enlightenment values of reason, and to aim for a more human – and humane – way of viewing the world.  Open-mindedness and critical thinking are complex but essential weapons in this mission.

Thanks for reading.

David

References (in addition to those hyperlinked in the text):

Alcock, D. (2019a) ‘An Optimistic Education: Rebalancing the curriculum to more accurately convey human progress’. Impact: Journal of Chartered College of Teaching, Issue 6: https://impact.chartered.college/article/an-optimistic-education-rebalancing-curriculum-accurately-convey-human-progress/

Alcock, D. (2019b) ‘Optimism, Progress and Geography – Celebration and calibration’. Teaching Geography, 44(3), 118-120.

Buerk, M. (2020) ‘I’m not a baby person’, Radio Times, 24-30 January 2020 issue, pp10-13

DeFries, R. (2014) The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Environmental Crisis.

Duffy, B. (2018) The Perils of Perception: Why We’re Wrong about Nearly Everything. London: Atlantic.

Norberg, J. (2017) Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future London: OneWorld

Pinker, S. (2018) Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress London: Penguin

Rosling, H., Rosling, O. and Rosling Rönnlund, A. (2018) Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World – and Why Things are Better than you Think. London: Hodder and Stoughton.