We know that excursions and excursion are appreciated by students. Excursions and field study are also important learning tools in geography. Excursions are based on the idea that the context for learning is made in the particular context where the object for learning takes place and is placed, geography thus embodies the practice of in situ learning. (Kent et al., 1997).
It is an interesting moment to write Progress in Human Geography’s first report on qualitative methods. In one sense, it suggests these methods have, at long last, arrived and been accepted as established approaches. That this is an overdue recognition needs little emphasizing when surveying the number of articles drawing upon, at least in part, qualitative material. However, a less encouraging omen is the recent column in the UK Economic and Social Research Council’s Social Sciences, penned by the chief executive (Marshall, 2001). In it he asserts: ‘British universities and colleges are not producing quantitatively competent social scientists in sufficient numbers.’ Although he does not mention what ‘non-quantitative’ research is doing, he discusses a series of remedial measures – such as compulsory training in statistics, prioritized awards for quantitative PhD projects, tied studentships and specialist research centres. To paraphrase Spike Milligan’s comment on army training, the attitude appears to be – if someone dies when you hang them, keep hanging them until they get used to it. It is already feeding through into new postgraduate Research Training Guidelines. The problem we are told is acute, though the evidence presented is scant and, moreover, ironically seems to consist of unanalysed, qualitative reports from meetings with civil servants: ‘Failure to [remedy the shortage] is likely to result in Britain falling behind the rest of Europe, both in the provision of tal
The purpose of teaching is primarily to assist the learner acquire the type of knowledge and skill that will produce desirable change in him. This can be actualized if the teaching and learning process provides the enabling environment for the learner to think critically, analytically and consequently, be an agent of change. Generally, the educational system is subdivided into the primary, secondary and tertiary levels. In some cases, the pre-primary education is an integral part of the primary level.