There is a spectre terrorising geography classrooms. It turns up, unannounced, dressed as Mount St Helens or the Kobe earthquake in 1995. That’s right, it’s the ghost of the “zombie” case studies.
These case studies have been staples of geography teaching for decades and are now well past their natural life expectancy. Yet they seem impossible to kill off, and stagger on through resource after resource.
Students don’t need to be learning how Mount St Helens erupted in 1980, when they can watch a live webcam of a current eruption - but in some schools, they still are.
Why are ‘zombie’ teaching resources problematic?
“Zombie case studies” was not a term used in Ofsted’s geography inspection report, although the inspectorate did highlight how some teachers were using out-of-date photographs and data that presented overly simplistic, inaccurate and/or outdated views of the places being studied.
We know that misconceptions about the world prevail: many people believe that 14 per cent of the world’s people are refugees (when the actual figure in mid-2022 was 0.4 per cent) or that only 20 per cent of girls in low-income countries attend school (when the actual figure is now around 60 per cent).
One of geography’s responsibilities is to reveal the world as it is - not as it was. So if out-of-date resources are used, the subject’s potential to achieve this is eroded.
For example, in the pre-internet early 1990s a range of distant-locality photo-packs were published to support primary colleagues in teaching about places in the Caribbean, South America, Africa and Asia. Indeed, in a different job I wrote some of them. These are still being taught in some schools and teachers should question whether presenting 30-year-old images of people’s lives and circumstances is appropriate.
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The undead are also found in geographical models. Theoretical models, such as the water cycle or plate boundaries, have real value in making key processes more visible without reality’s clutter. However, when used uncritically, they can allow students to think that a model is always true and the messy real world is “wrong”. Teacher Hannah Steel’s blog about why ”all models are wrong, but some are useful” is a valuable review of this issue.
Ofsted has noted how using theoretical models can develop students’ knowledge, especially when their formation and limitations are explored. But Ofsted also saw that some schools were uncritically teaching longstanding and contested models such as Burgess, Rostow and Demographic Change. Burgess’ model is a classic “zombie”; its concentric circles have become the definitive answer for what cities should look like, even though it describes the specific circumstances of 1920s Chicago.
How to keep geography teaching current
I recognise that keeping up to date can be challenging, but there are some simple tools that can help with this. I have been using the hashtag #geographerinthenews on X (formerly Twitter) to provide links to topical news stories featuring geographical research and expert geographers’ work.
Meanwhile, David Alcock’s concept of “hopeful geography” provides a pedagogical framework that draws attention to the positive progress that has been secured over recent decades.
It’s up to geography teachers to finally finish off the geographical undead. Through their determined consideration of how and why case studies are chosen, geography will be better placed to teach students about the living, breathing world.
Steve Brace is a freelance geographer and former head of education at the Royal Geographical Society
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