Using literature in lessons to develop sense of place

 

If you've taught the AQA A level Changing Places unit, you might know how challenging it can be to help students fully understand sense of place. Whilst teaching in an International school, it became even more important to try and develop students' own understanding of how their attachment to, and sense of place, changes as they move from location to location. 

In order to help support students when they reach A level, our department decided to embed the concepts linked to the Changing Places unit lower down school, starting in Year 8. This combined well with the Young Geography of The Year 2021 competition on 'Remapping our lives' and gave us the opportunity to create a unit of work which really helped students to see how sense of place, attachment and meaning changes over time and with various events.

After reading The Beekeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri, I felt particularly moved and amazed that the book was able to help me imagine Syria before and after the upheaval felt by Nuri and Afra, and I was able to clearly picture their changing landscape as the book progresses. I felt that the book gave a beautiful account of their feelings to Syria before and after moving and I knew I wanted to use it in my lessons somehow.

I decided to start the lesson using imagery, showing students images of Syria, where they had to describe what they could see and make inferences about which place we might be looking at. Many students guessed Greece, Turkey and the Mediterranean from the images of olive trees, hotel resorts, historical palaces and grand buildings. None were able to identify it as being Syria, until I showed them more recent images from the news where conflict and destruction have changed the landscape hugely.

I took two extracts from the book and students had to highlight and compare the same place before and after the influence of conflict. We spent time discussing how the attachment Nuri and Afra felt to Aleppo changed between the extracts.

At the end of the lesson we built up a mind map to connect our knowledge of how appearance, family connections, landscape, climate, politics, history and emotion all combined to change the sense of place and feelings of attachment that people may feel to a location.

Overall, I loved planning this lesson and felt that so much was gained from embedding this unit of work within KS3. I will definitely be aiming to include more literature within lessons to help students visualise different locations they may have never experienced in real life.