{"id":6981,"date":"2017-06-12T06:05:30","date_gmt":"2017-06-12T06:05:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=6981"},"modified":"2017-06-12T06:05:30","modified_gmt":"2017-06-12T06:05:30","slug":"the-value-of-fieldwork","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2017\/06\/12\/the-value-of-fieldwork\/","title":{"rendered":"The value of fieldwork"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was pleased to see Alan Kinder's blog<\/a> for NAEE the other day:\u00a0The contribution of fieldwork to geography education<\/em>. \u00a0As the\u00a0Chief Executive of The Geographical Association, Alan knows a lot about this subject. \u00a0He was arguing against the popular view that\u00a0\u00a0fieldwork is\u00a0\u2018only about skills\u2019. \u00a0Unfortunately, as he noted, that view is held by Ofqual, the qualifications regulator. \u00a0As such, it has consequences.<\/p>\n

I'm going to quote his main argument:<\/p>\n

\"Rather, I suggest that fieldwork involves and develops the act of observing and asking questions of and in the real world and that this provides a unique and essential learning experience for young people. \u00a0It develops investigative skills, careful observation and primary (first-hand) data collection in distinctive and important ways. \u00a0But this experience isn\u2019t simply a skill, or a technical procedure. \u00a0Fieldwork investigation gives young people experience of the complexity of a real world location and invites them to both appreciate and begin to make sense of its complexity, or \u2018messiness\u2019. \u00a0Doing so helps them to appreciate that the \u2018theoretical\u2019 world of the textbook and their own investigative research is partial and limited. \u00a0This seems to me to be a critical insight into the nature of geography, of geographical knowledge and the process of becoming a geographer: we do geography fieldwork because direct observation is an essential, rewarding but challenging part of creating valid knowledge about the world. \u00a0I am drawing on a very long tradition of thinking here: in the 13th Century the English philosopher Roger Bacon asserted that both \u2018Experimentum\u2019 and \u2018Argumentum\u2019 were necessary ingredients to understanding phenomena fully; the 18th Century writer Goethe concluded that understanding also affects observation (\u2018we only see what we know\u2019) and more recently, Alex Standish of the UCL Institute of Education has suggested that fieldwork helps pupils to understand that their agency is involved in gaining knowledge \u2013 that it doesn\u2019t just \u2018drop out of a textbook\u2019.\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well said, and the very best fieldwork that I have seen over the years has illustrated this. \u00a0I still remember being on Dartmoor with my PGCE students and a school group in the 1980s \u2013 we\u00a0were all in the excellent hands of FSC tutors. \u00a0The only quibble I have with Alan Kinder's argument is that it could well have been titled: 'The contribution of fieldwork to a young person's education'. \u00a0The contribution of geography is undeniable, but other subjects have a role as well. \u00a0It would be good to see these distinctive (and overlapping) contributions laid out.<\/p>\n

As a postscript, I should say how very good it was to see these arguments set out without recourse to the increasingly meaningless phrase 'outdoor learning'.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was pleased to see Alan Kinder's blog for NAEE the other day:\u00a0The contribution of fieldwork to geography education. \u00a0As the\u00a0Chief Executive of The Geographical Association, Alan knows a lot about this subject. \u00a0He was arguing against the popular view...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-new-publications"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6981"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6981\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}