Secondary courses at Magdalen Farm
The Magdalen Farm environment in conjunction with the diverse rural surroundings offer special opportunities for investigative fieldwork for secondary geography students at both A level and GCSE.
The geography courses offered at Magdalen Farm draw upon a long experience of teaching secondary geography in the field and the classroom but informed by the emerging priorities of student-centred learning and education for sustainability.
The approaches to learning and the course content reflect the following principles:
- Student centred, enquiry based learning with the support of experienced tutors and appropriate resources.
- A partnership between Magdalen Farm and schools to ensure the relevance and appropriateness of both course content and learning strategies
- An acknowledgement of the equal validity of quantitative and qualitative approaches to fieldwork.
- Valuing emotional responses to experiences of places in order to achieve a balance between sensory and scientific understandings.
- Integrating the residential experience, socially and ecologically with the content and processes of the course.
- Enabling investigations to arise at least in part from pupils own experiences of environments but guided by curriculum requirements.
- Establishing links between the rural context of field investigations and the home environment.
- Providing opportunities, through the formal and informal curricula, for students to explore their own environmental ethic.
- Linking the geographical concepts explored through fieldwork with the sustainable principles which inform both the residential setting and the farm. Reflection is encouraged on food, energy, transportation and waste treatment during the residential experience.
The resources of the farm and its surroundings, the rural environs and its settlements as well as accessibility to the Dorset coast offer opportunities for a full range of geographical investigations. These include:
River channels and floodplains
Integrated investigations of small catchments
Woodland ecosystems and habitats
Farms as ecosystems
Coastal processes and coastal zone management
Rural settlement futures
Weather and energy
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