David Rogers

David Rogers is Curriculum Leader for Geography at Priory School Specialist Sports College in Portsmouth.  He is a Fellow of the RoyalnGeographical Society and a Chartered Geographer (Teacher). When he’s not tearing down a hill on a mountain bike or climbing a big mountain, David’s main interests are developing young people’s understanding of place and space and innovation in learning. This often, although not always, involves technology.

David is not a fan of desks, but had stayed behind one long enough to write a number of textbooks. He is a founding member of the Geography Collective, a group of people that are trying to get (young) people to think about and explore places in different ways.

Project Summary
Two days of critical and creative thinking to develop participants’ expertise in ‘place creation’ through a series of experimental explorations and exchanges followed by the designing of new ‘places’ for the school.

Exploring possibilities for change
A day’s workshop that will consist of a range of activities developed to challenge participants to sense the familiar landscape of their school in new ways. Participants will have their senses and abilities heightened and impaired to confront them with ideas of ‘the other’ and how different people experience the same space in different ways. Specifically, students will think about how (dis)ability, gender and groupings interact differently with school spaces and use illustration techniques to communicate their findings. They will then deepen their explorations by conducting reflective-speed-mapping into social, economic, political, cultural and environmental dimensions of school places. Towards the end of day one participants will begin to thinking about the difference between best and next practice by conducting a thought revolution and thinking through the ‘rules’ that create their current place and questioning ‘what if?’ these rules were changed.

Create visions for an alterative place and communicate their ideas
Workshops are planned over two or three days for participants to think, design and communicated how they conceptualise new spaces/places within the schools and how these should be created. Working in small groups they will be set the challenge of creating a map, model and poster that clearly communicates their ideas. It is in these workshops that they will be helped to use learn key language effectively to exchange and express their plans. Once completed, their work will be put on display within a micro-fair that will be used to consult and gain feedback from other members of the school community.

Work with professionals, now and in the future
The Priory Space Exploration Project and its activities will be written into a space.exploration.cookbook that will contain recipes and lesson plans that can be used by teachers in the school after the intensive workshops have taken place. The project will act as a significant part of the CPD for participating teachers as they will be trained to facilitate the course by taking part in every stage in the project’s development and evaluation.

A slideshow of the project can be viewed by clicking:

http://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0AUtxNn8NWtqFZGQzcm10aHFfNmhwZzhtYmc2&hl=en

Project leaders
The workshops will be led by members of the Geography Collective:
Daniel Raven-Ellison, urban adventurer, education project manager, guerrilla geographer and writer.
Kye Askins, Doctor of Human Geography at Northumberland University, lecturer and geography activist.
Tom Morgan-Jones, games company director and illustrator of children’s books and political magazines.