Introductory techniques

Pupils could start by collectively exploring what makes a place a good place to live by listing and sorting their thoughts on a large sheet of paper. The Project for Public Spaces has some useful information, including a wheel which could support pupils with some ideas and key vocabulary as required.

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Pupils could also discuss whether smell has an impact on life in their local area and go on a short walk around their neighbourhood, recording any smells that they encounter on a map and using the smell wheel as support.

Questions:

• Might there be a variation in smells over time? For example, across a day, week, season or year?
• Would you expect smells to be similar or different in rural areas compared to urban areas? How could you change the smell wheel to reflect this?

Environmental Quality Assessment

An EQA uses pupils’ judgement to assess environmental quality against a range of indicators. One format can make use of a sliding scale of quality (such as 1 to 5) to represent less good to good, like the example below. Teachers will probably need to guide their pupils in completing an EQA for the first time.

Questions:

• Why have these categories been chosen? What other things might we want to include?
• Have we all got the same score?
  • Carry out the EQA for the location we are standing in – the teacher may need to model this for pupils.

We all see, hear and smell differently but this is a good opportunity to talk about subjectivity and the importance of consistency across sites.

• How could we make the process more reliable? i.e. what could we do to ensure our scores are more similar?

This might mean deciding together what a 1 and a 5 look like for each category, or, if working in groups, an average being taken of everyone’s individual scores.

• Should we just use the table in one location?

Discuss with pupils the value of visiting a number of sites to allow comparison as well as an ‘average’ impression of the local area as a whole. Three sites would probably allow for this.

Data presentation

Discuss what else influences how pleasant a place is to visit/live?

Examples might include: the weather, people and prior experiences.

Presentation of total EQA scores located on OS map.

In this example students can draw a simple bar chart and then cut out the bars and glue them into position on a map.  This helps to locate the information in context of the geography of the area.

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The Geographical Association (GA) has worked closely with the Field Studies Council (FSC) to develop these resources.