Follow up

Exploration and Extreme Fieldwork

Key questions

What are the key challenges in undertaking extreme fieldwork?

How can we compare and contrast different types of extreme fieldwork?

Are the conclusions to the ‘Hugging the Coast’ fieldwork valid?

Background

This homework project looks more at the issues of exploring and extreme fieldwork, more than it looks at specific geographical concepts. The purpose is to make students think deeply about the issues with regards to remote travel and pushing their limits. It does also build skills related to Geographical Investigation, in particular:

• The interrogation of extended prose

• The interrogation of data

Starter

As we have seen in lesson three the method of fieldwork impacted upon the quality of information the Hugging the Coast team were able to collect.

Students should now read the series of extracts describing aspects of the fieldwork.

 Students are to:

• Put down what they thought the aims of the expedition were

• Note down what the problems were than needed to be overcome

• Whether the problems impacted on the validity of the results and the conclusions of the project in any way (both positively and negatively).

Research on other types of expedition

The two excel documents show mood and expedition data for two very different types of expedition:

• Antarctic Sledge Haul: is from a five week private science expedition to Antarctica in 2007 during which four teachers sledge hauled from location to location looking at various scientific and geographical topics. The author was looking at the psychology of expeditions and the data is his

• Cycle Across America: is from James Ketchell’s cycle across America in 2012, which he did as a training event for an even bigger project (more information on James, the cycle ride and the even bigger challenge. The Cycle Across America data has already been turned into graphs, whereas the Antarctica data has only had one graph created from it

Main Activity 

Students are to interrogate the data from the Cycle Across America data, which can be put together with James’ blog and try to work out which factors had the biggest impact. They can then interrogate the Antarctic data to look for similarities and differences (exact comparisons are not possible as the data does not use the same factors).

Plenary

Students are to answer the following questions:

• What are the three main factors influencing travel in remote locations?

• Did the ‘Hugging the Coast’ Fieldwork suffer from these factors?

• Are the conclusions to the ‘Hugging the Coast’ Fieldwork valid?