Landscape assessment: a forgotten tool for stimulating student enquiry?

ABSTRACT

Approaches to landscape assessment have been widely debated and, despite their usefulness in educational settings, have generally fallen out of favour. Yet, ways to record, monitor and discuss landscape quality are becoming more important as the pace of landscape change increases. The growing prominence of ‘place’ and ‘place-making’ in geography presents an opportunity to reinvigorate landscape assessment in educational contexts. In this article, we present a tool for assessing the visual quality of landscapes, which can be adapted for use in a range of environments. We discuss the results of a pilot study that deployed the approach. We demonstrate how the tool can be used to monitor landscape changes and how the experience of generating data, as well as the results, can be used as a catalyst for discussions about place, land use, development and the contested nature of valued landscapes.

Acknowledgements

The original Welsh VQI was designed and developed as part of the Glastir Monitoring and Evaluation Programme (GMEP), which was funded by the Welsh Government (reference: C147/2010/11). We acknowledge the GMEP project team for the provision of data on which the Welsh VQI was developed. Anne Brown received Staffordshire University Impact Case Study Research Assistantship funding for elements of work connected to this research. We would like to thank staff at the Field Studies Council for their support and enthusiasm for the development of the VQI as an educational tool. Thank you to James Bromhead and Helen Robertson at FSC Epping Forest for helping Edward Jones trial the VQI while he was employed by the FSC. We are grateful to Matthew Amison (Lichfield Cathedral School), Kate Bruce, Suzanne Detton (Nottingham Free School), Kaylee Walsh (Phoenix Collegiate, West Bromwich) and Becky Zacune (Biddulph High School) for their feedback on the utility of the VQI Toolkit and to Marie Roe (Derby High School) for her observations on the approach. We would also like to thank William McLaughlan for his assistance in developing and administering the VQI questionnaire for teachers and the North Staffordshire Branch of the Geographical Association for their enthusiastic support for this work. We are grateful for constructive review-stage comments, which improved this article.

Dedication

This article is dedicated to the memory of Sister Mary Henry of St Dominic's Priory School, Stone, who was a long-standing member of the North Staffordshire Geographical Association Branch and a former Honorary President.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fiona S. Tweed

Fiona S. Tweed (email: [email protected]; Twitter: @ProfFionaTweed) is Professor of Physical Geography

Ruth D. Swetnam

Ruth D. Swetnam is Professor of Applied Geography, both Staffordshire University, UK

Edward Jones

Edward Jones is a teacher of geography at Buxton Community School, UK.

Anne Brown

Anne Brown is a retired former Head of Geography