Geography

Our Vision

We want to form people who are capable of making sense of the world around them, studying issues carefully, making well informed judgements and then being capable of expressing those opinions well. In other words they will have the ability to process and present information in a thoughtful way and shape the world around them. Hence we will develop the students’ literary skills, conceptual understanding and specialist vocabulary. We will challenge the students to demonstrate different levels of thinking skills from pure knowledge through to comprehension and use of information, to the analysis and evaluation of data and ideas. By presenting a broader swath of the worlds physical and cultural geography they will gain a better grasp of peoples and places and how they interact. The ultimate aim is to help the students become well rounded and employable people.

Along the way the students get to explore what is a wonderfully rich and diverse subject.

Geography at PSA:

• Provides students with new ways of thinking about the world using ‘big ideas’ such as Place, Space and Interconnection.
• Provides students with powerful ways of analysing, explaining and understanding the world.
• Gives students power over their own knowledge- students need to know about the discipline and how knowledge has been developed and tested.
• Enables students to follow and participate in debates in significant local, national and global issues.
• Takes students beyond their own experience. This knowledge of the world contributes strongly to students’ general knowledge and cultural capital.

The curriculum builds up student’s knowledge of the world and cultural capital through the variety of topics it deals with and skills it develops. Knowledge acquired in year 7 such as map skills are further built on in year 8 and in GCSE. At the completion of KS3 the students will be capable of progressing fluidly into the demands of the OCR GCSE course due to having dealt with many human and physical aspects of geography such as glaciation and rivers and having studied aspects of many countries such as Russia and India. They will have examined and applied concepts and ideas such as demographics and globalisation. At the completion of the curriculum students will understand:

• basic physical systems that affect everyday life (e.g. earth-sun relationships, water cycles, wind and ocean currents).
• the location of places and the physical and cultural characteristics of those places so they can see how interdependent the world is.
• how the processes of human and physical systems have arranged and sometimes changed the surface of the earth.
• recognize spatial distributions at all scales — local and global — in order to understand the complex connectivity of people and places.

The PSA curriculum is not about students leaving with a long list of facts about the world; we want our students to appreciate the ever-evolving nature of Geography as an academic discipline. Students will learn about places that are outside of their own experiences, they will develop their understanding of the world’s diversity of environments, peoples, cultures and economies. Students will develop a global ‘open mindedness’ so that they can challenge stereotypes and go beyond their everyday experience. The ultimate goal is to equip our students well for the world of work as we embark on the fourth/ robotic revolution that will change the world and reshape all economies.

For further information about our Geography curriculum, please contact Mr Sidhu by emailing info@psa-bucks.com