Geography Undergraduates into Teaching: A Five Year Experiment

Abstract

School geography teaching has been a less popular career option for graduates recently. This paper reports on a programme designed to put undergraduate geographers into secondary schools to observe teachers and assist in teaching, with a view to encouraging them to consider secondary school teaching as a career. The organization and syllabus of the programme are described and a tentative evaluation offered using students' reflective accounts drawn from their portfolios. Students reflected upon the nature of teaching as a career, its professional characteristics, the skills a teacher employs, their own potential as teachers and the wider contexts within which schools operate.

Keywords:

• School teaching
• school placement programme
• shadowing of teachers by undergraduates
• portfolios
• reflective writing

Acknowledgements

The author owes a great deal to the initial efforts of David Burtenshaw, without whom there never would have been any Geography and Education programme. First Louis Murray, and after his retirement, Andrew Porter, as PGCE Geography Tutors in the School of Education gave support and advice, and Andrew Porter also acted as the second marker from 2004 to 2005. Professor David Gilbert, the External Examiner for much of this period, was also most encouraging and generous in his praise. The author must, of course, thank all the geography teachers in the 25 local schools and colleges that became partners, for their cooperation and for the way they nurtured the students as potential teachers. He would like to thank the students themselves for entering into the culture of learning and teaching and teaching him new things and Avril Maddrell and the anonymous referees for useful comments on the manuscript.