This year marks the start of the new Secondary 2 Geography syllabus, with an emphasis on the concept of sustainability. Simply put, there is now a stronger focus on the idea of sustainable development when it comes to housing and transport, i.e. maintaining the balance between people’s quality of life, and the quality of the environment.
Consequently, there is a shift in the Geographical Investigation (GI) focus, in alignment with the new syllabus. The inquiry question in previous iterations of GI was "What contributes to a sense of belonging to the residents in a neighbourhood?", and with a greater focus on sustainability, the new inquiry question would look something like "How do different features in the neighbourhood impact residents’ quality of life and the environment?"
Also, there is now an additional Stage 5 in the Inquiry Cycle, "Reflecting & Taking Action", where students will go beyond drawing conclusions to suggest improvements and take action to contribute to the sustainable development of housing.
Using this post to document my design considerations, as well as my reflections/takeaways from the execution of the GI package. 😊
Stages of GI:
'Simplified' breakdown of each stage of the inquiry cycle (student-facing)
1. Pre-Fieldwork
In this stage, students were first reintroduced to what a GI is (since they have done one in Sec As a start, they should have been able to outline the main processes of GI, and explain the purpose of a GI.
The package designed then set the context of this year's GI - the sustainable development of housing. The inquiry question posed was "How do different features in the neighbourhood impact residents’ quality of life?"
*You may have noticed from a few sentences ago that I mentioned that the inquiry question should look something like "How do different features in the neighbourhood impact residents’ quality of life and the environment?" However, I came to the realisation that this would mean that there will be 3 variables when students attempt to come up with a hypothesis [and for feasibility of investigation sake, our usual practice is to stick to 2 specific and measurable variables]. Hence, I decided to narrow the scope to only the impacts of features on people.
The intention was then for the sustainability element to come in more strongly in Stage 5, where students will be coming up with solutions/improvements. So a possibility would be to get them to design a chosen feature in the neighbourhood to both improve the quality of life of people, as well as ensure that this feature would be sustainable and beneficial to the environment. [more on that later!]
Students then zoomed in on the concept of 'quality of life'. Through the video stimuli provided, students recalled that quality of life refers to a person's well being, in terms of their physical and mental health, comfort, and relationship with others.
As a form of demonstration of learning, students then explored several common features in a neighbourhood (e.g. void deck, playgrounds, etc) and explained how these features impact residents' quality of life.
The pre-fieldwork stage was concluded with a research task, where students made use of EduGIS resources as well as a list of curated web links to find out more about the the study area (Bukit Panjang).
A snapshot of the SLS lesson used to facilitate the pre-fieldwork process:
2. Actual Fieldwork
The actual fieldwork stage was when the students delved into gathering data to prove their hypothesis (i.e. in terms of how different features in a neighbourhood impacted the quality of life of their chosen target group).
Below is the design map for the actual fieldwork package:
In alignment with the active learning process, we started off with the activation of students' prior knowledge on the aspects contributing to quality of life, before promoting thinking and discussion in terms of how features in Bangkit neighbourhood impact residents' quality of life.
Since we were still living during COVID times (i.e. couldn't bring students out for an actual fieldwork experience), we decided to make the virtual experience of neighbourhood exploration as immersive as possible for our Sec 2 students. A Thinglink was created, where we embedded various types stimuli such as videos, 360° photos, and websites onto a neighbourhood map of Bangkit (Link: Bangkit Thinglink map).
After which, we used a padlet to consolidate their findings from the neighbourhood exploration. The subsequent activities promoted further thinking and discussion, and also provided checkpoints for the demonstration of learning.
Several things that students accomplished in their GI groups:
Crafting a group hypothesis
Crafting a survey to collect primary data
Analysing the data collected and representing them
Concluding their hypothesis
The conclusion of the actual fieldwork phase also coincided with the Sec 2 MYE preparation, nicely segueing us into the revision of GI skills [a section in their MYE paper].
3. Post-Fieldwork
In the final stage of the GI, one of the tasks was for students to design their Dream Neighbourhood, accompanied by a short write-up to explain how the neighbourhood they have designed would (1) improve the quality of life of its residents AND (2) maintain or improve the quality of the environment.
The fun part was that students had the autonomy to choose what platform they wanted to create their neighbourhood prototype on. The prototypes can be designed by:
Using ANY online platform OR
Building a physical prototype using recycled materials OR
Drawing a 2D land use plan including drawings of amenities/facilities
Initially, I was unsure if we should provide students with a list of online platforms to choose from, since I was afraid that students may not be able to choose appropriate platforms that will allow them to design their prototypes in a way that fulfills the task requirement. (In other words, students may be 'disadvantaged' by virtue of their choice of platform).
However, wise Raine shared that our students will surprise us with their creativity and resourcefulness when it comes to such hands-on projects. Eventually, we went ahead with giving student FULL autonomy on choice of platform, and I am super glad we did because of the wonderful prototypes students came up with.
Student Artefact:
[Fun fact, I was in my Animal Crossing phase and hence created a Dream Neighbourhood on AC as a sample that I included in the briefing slides hahaha: check it out!!!]
Another concern I had was whether we will be able to develop a rubric that is 'universal enough' in order for us to grade prototypes made of different mediums. After much deliberation and discussion, I am glad that we did manage to come up with a rubric that allowed us to fairly and rather smoothly assign a grade to all types of neighbourhood prototypes. 🎉
Seems like an abrupt end to this post but
I truly feel alive when creating resources!!!
Till next time!
Hi Wen Xin,
Thought this sharing on the Sec 2 GI was very interesting. I especially liked the part about the prototype and allowing students to choose their method of representation - I always wondered about the feasibility of doing this in a real classroom because it's one of the methods that we always talk about when discussing potential opps for DI. So it's great to hear how students really put in so much effort to make such different and well-designed prototypes (always had my doubts that they would take the easy way out). Looking forward to more sharing!