Our Year 9 geographers have been out and about locally this week to support and illuminate their studies in school, coinciding with National Fieldwork Week. The pupils visited Culverhouse Cross, a district between Cardiff and the Vale of Glamorgan, as part of their Urban Environments topic, looking at developments on the rural-urban fringe.
The group enjoyed a practical, hands-on session, conducting field work to identify the factors that have encouraged businesses such as Cardiff City Football Club, Leckwith Stadium, Marks & Spencer, Tesco, Cardiff Airport and St Andrew’s Major Golf Club to locate in this area. Considerations included local infrastructure, relief of the land, demographics of the area and land value.
Fieldwork is an essential part of Geography, enabling young people to develop their subject knowledge, gain a range of skills that are difficult to develop in the classroom alone, and helping them to understand the ‘messiness’ of geographical reality.
The national awareness week is designed to enourage pupils to get out into the local area to carry out their studies and to spend time learning outdoors. It presents an opportunity for students to investigate, observe, discover, challenge, test out ideas and gain a deeper and wider understanding of the world around them.
As with all of our academic subjects, and crucially at GCSE and IB level, at Westbourne we encourage a hands-on approach to learning, making sure our pupils are fully engaged with the curriculum, inspired to think about the wider world, and that they are able to apply theory to a range of real-life situations.