There is a special place in my heart for the Burgess Model. My GSCE geography coursework involved me walking up and down the streets of Loughborough, recording every building or land use on either side of the main roads and then converting my notes into an elaborate map of the town, demarcating all the different zones. I was very proud of the map that I produced, proving that Loughborough fitted the Burgess Model. And I got a very good mark for it!
However, as so passionately articulated by Charles Rawding in the latest edition of the GA’s Teaching Geography (Volume 44, Number 3, Autumn 2019), this model is defunct and has never sufficiently displayed the complex and dynamic nature of cities. Although I have never taught the Burgess Model as gospel, only occasionally referring to it as an example of how urban land use has been modeled, reading this article got me thinking about the importance of constantly re-evaluating the models and generalisations that we use in our teaching.
Since I was at school, there are a number of other models and generalisations that have been shown to be too reductionist, or just plain wrong and which have now been resigned to the bin alongside the Burgess Model. For example, the global divide between MEDCs and LEDCs, which I was taught at school, but which ignorantly and dangerously turned the world into a binary place where you were either rich or poor. However, whereas examples like the Brandt Line have so obviously become obsolete, I imagine that there are others out there, hiding in among our day to day teaching that need rooting out and either updating or discarding.
For example, the Clark-Fisher model. This is a model that I have used regularly throughout my teaching career to demonstrate the changing industrial structure that a country goes through as it becomes more economically developed. However, and this is something that I even tell the students, the Clark-Fisher model was developed from, amongst other aspects, the historical change that the UK experienced in unique circumstances. It was also first devised as an economic model, not a geographic model, thereby ignoring place dependent contextual data. To therefore try and apply this model verbatim to other countries is a grave generalisation and huge mistake, and yet I find it happening in my classroom. Just like with the Burgess Model, it hides the variations between locations and dismisses the contextual factors that are so important in determining how a place develops over time. For example the rapid development of employment sectors like tourism in Jamaica and financial services in Hong Kong mean that not all countries are going to experience an industrial phase in the same way that the UK did.
As teachers of geography, it is our duty to make sure that the models that we use to teach children and the viewpoints that this then engenders in them are ones that do not misrepresent the world we live in. To a certain extent, there are always going to be some generalisations as the world is far too complex a place to be able to cover every individual variation and difference, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t regularly evaluate the frameworks we are creating by which students judge the world around them.
To that end, over this next year, integrated into the review of our curriculum, we will be looking out for these out-dated models and generalisations and updating/discarding them to make sure that our students are getting the truest possible representation of the ever changing world in which they currently live.
As an aside, Hans Rosling’s Factfulness is an excellent stay on some of the prevalent misconceptions held by the public, challenging them and painting a much more positive view of the world than many people hold. Well worth a read!
BVC Geography 