Geography Fieldwork Projects

This text gives students doing geography fieldwork projects guidance on careful planning and organization, and explains how to write final reports. It allows students to practice and learn appropriate fieldwork techniques and shows how to select and apply these skills in real investigations. Divided into six core topic areas, for each topic there is a trial run project for students to work through as an example of an actual fieldwork investigation. This is followed by a short project and an investigation that can be carried out, including techniques required, equipment needed and likely sources of information. Extra investigations and a full list of sources of information to help with projects are available on the accomanying website.

Synopsis coming soon.......

Geographers regard fieldwork as a vital instrument for understanding our world through direct experience, for gathering basic data about this world, and as a fundamental method for enacting geographical education. The range of international geography and educational experts who contributed to this volume has demonstrated that the concept of fieldwork has a considerable history in the field of geography. They have demonstrated that the theoretical aspects of fieldwork have been interpreted differently in regions around the world, but the importance of fieldwork remains strong globally. A fresh look at the pedagogic implications for fieldwork in formal education offers ideas both for promoting it in geographical education and for maintaining its place in the geography curriculum. Audience: Forward-looking geographers and educators now recognise that alternative strategies, especially those involving the use of information technology, should be developed to reaffirm the centrality of fieldwork in geographical and wider education.

I am very pleased to have been asked by Rod Gerber to provide a preface to such a book. Not least because of the twenty-four chapters, eight are written by former students or colleagues with whom I have worked in the past and whom I still meet at conferences on geographical education. It is with a certain pride and joy that I note the progress which has been made in geographical education both in its day to day teaching and in research, in the twenty years following the end of my term of office as Chair of the Commission on Geographical Education of the International Geographical Union (CGEIUG). My successors, Joe Stoltman, Hartwig Haubrich, Rod Gerber and now Lea Houtsonen, have done much and are continuing to work hard, to foster the development of geographical education. This book is proof, if proof were needed, that the international collaboration in this field, is alive and well, with contributions coming from all the continents (except Antarctica!). It would be a moribund subject that remained unaffected in one way or another by developments on the 'great world stage', as Fairgrieve (1926) would have put it. And, as Rod Gerber shows, the issues of globalisation, of cultural encounters, of differing value systems, of new technologies, of variable economic development and of environmental quality, all feature as topics which influence and are influenced by, geographical education.