How to make geography school trips more inclusive for everyone

Making geography fieldwork accessible

For Jill, inclusivity starts before students even set off. Rather than making the trip compulsory for geography students, she opens it up to the wider Year 12 group and presents it as an opportunity to experience a new environment first-hand.

This approach means students can take part because they are interested in the experience, even if geography is not their main subject. Once on the trip, Jill also makes sure students are not expected to arrive with a detailed understanding of the landscape.

For a geography trip, this is particularly valuable. Students can learn about the physical processes shaping the environment alongside its human geography, history and culture. In Iceland, for example, Field Study Tutors have helped students understand both the breath-taking landscapes they are seeing and the people and stories connected to them.

Bringing the landscape back to the classroom

The learning doesn’t stop when the trip ends. Jill uses photographs and videos from the trip in lessons, encouraging students to explain what they are seeing and put each location into geographical context.

This helps turn a memorable experience into geographical understanding, while also allowing students who did not attend to engage with some of the learning from the trip.

The value of experiencing places

For Jill, one of the greatest benefits of field trips is simply giving students the chance to see somewhere different.

Having taught in very different educational settings, she has seen pupils who had rarely travelled beyond their local area. She believes that experiencing new landscapes, places and cultures can have a lasting impact. That impact might be immediate, such as the ‘instant awe’ of seeing Gullfoss, or something students remember years later. It can even influence their interest in geography beyond the trip itself.

Furthermore, fieldwork doesn’t have to mean an expensive overseas trip. A local coastline, river, urban area or nature reserve can all provide opportunities to investigate geographical processes and apply classroom learning to the real world.

Ultimately, making geography trips inclusive is about creating opportunities for students to experience places for themselves, whilst avoiding assumptions about what they have already seen or experienced.

For geography, that opportunity to experience the world beyond the classroom can be one of the most memorable parts of learning the subject.