Understanding and Teaching Primary Geography

This book outlines how good teaching of primary geography can extend children′s world awareness and help them make connections between their environmental and geographical experiences. Chapters offer guidance on important learning and teaching issues as well as the use and creation of resources from the school environment to the global context. It covers all the key topics in primary geography including: understanding places physical and human geography environmental sustainability learning outside the classroom global issues citizenship and social justice. Summaries, classroom examples and practical and reflective tasks are included throughout to foster understanding and support the effective teaching of primary geography.

Simon Catling is Assistant Dean of the Westminster Institute of Education at Oxford Brookes University. He spent many years as a classroom teacher in primary schools in London before moving into teacher education, where he has worked with primary trainee teachers as geography tutor. His recent research has been in such areas as children’s understanding of geography, the state of primary geography and the provision of geography in primary teacher training courses. He has run many primary geography workshops and extended geography in-service courses. He has written widely on geography in primary education, including regularly in Primary Geographer. He is author of Placing Places and the Mapstart series

Tessa Willy has been Associate Professor, School Director of Teacher Education at Kingston University, UK, since early 2018. She spent the first years of her career as both a primary school teacher in a variety of different settings across the UK and a secondary-school geography teacher in the UK as well as in Malawi. Moving into higher education, she worked as senior lecturer in primary geography at the University of Roehampton, UK, where she developed an outdoor environmental area with colleagues and students that has been used as a model in initial teacher education and continuing professional development for teachers. Tessa′s areas of particular interest are in issues around the ethics of geography, notably climate change, sustainability, social justice and global citizenship. Tessa is been a member of the Editorial Board of the Geographical Association’s journal Primary Geography and has edited several issues