Geography Department

The department is fully committed to making geography at Millthorpe an exciting, dynamic and relevant subject. We endeavour to generate an interest which may influence the actions and expectations of our students within their everyday lives. As the barriers of distance are broken down by technology, the world is becoming increasingly accessible to everyone and the study of geography at Millthorpe should help students to make sense of both their immediate and more distant environments.

Geography helps to develop an understanding of some of the more important processes which give rise to pattern and variety on the earth’s surface. In recognising that these spatial arrangements will change, we stress the importance of the human decision making which leads to this dynamism. We encourage our students to value their environment and acknowledge their own potential impact on the lives of future generations, by becoming responsible citizens.

Geography creates an appreciation of the inter-dependence of different parts of the world and our own role within global environmental, economic, political and social change. We encourage our students to see how our own choices may have a direct impact on other people’s well being and opportunities; by taking an interest in society we assist in the development of the empathy skills needed to create their own system of values.

Our schemes of work are constantly being reviewed and revised to reflect the dynamic nature of the world we live in. We hope that our efforts to keep our case studies up to date will heighten the level of interest of our students and we have worked hard to incorporate a wide variety of activities to assist with this. Many of our strategies attempt to develop our students’ abilities to work independently and think broadly about the concepts and issues covered. We work hard to prepare our students to succeed in our subject by helping them to understand the ways that they will be assessed, by regularly appraising their own work and that of others.

Our work schemes reflect a modern view of the key ideas and concepts in the subject and these are supported by certain skills and techniques; the emphasis is on understanding and skills and less on factual knowledge.