Mission Explore link up with National Geographic

A wonderful blog post from the National Geographic My Wonderful World blog.

It describes their love of Mission Explore: the website and then the book, particularly the design drew them in.

We both fell in love with the Collective's revolutionary approach to engaging kids in real-world learning through "guerrilla geography," and pledged that if we ever decided to pick up and move to the U.K., we'd see if we could join them.


The blog post talks about 'Endangered Geographies' and five specific threats that the subject faces.
One of these, which relates directly to my work at the GA, is that of the curriculum...

The quality of geography education varies from teacher to teacher, school to school, and country to country. The subject is suffering what looks like a slow death in Australia, while in the U.K. geography is being increasingly squeezed to the margins of the curriculum. In the United States the subject has created a stronger public-engagement base, but remains too weak in too many schools.

In the U.K. the erosion of school trips and visits adds to this problem. Policies that make it harder for geography teachers to leave school for even a few hours are limiting the number of mediated "real-world" educational experiences children have. This inevitably has an impact not only young people's understanding of the world, but also on the recruitment and retention of geography students and staff. Learning about geography is just not the same if you are on the wrong side of the window.



There is also some advice on how to get geography off the "at risk" register...

A really useful blog post which I shall certainly use in some format for my forthcoming CPD events.
It finishes with the optimistic message from Dan Ellison that:

We do not think that Mission:Explore solves all of geography's problems, but we do hope that it makes a significant contribution.

Comments