Teaching geography 

Abstract: © TE A CH IN G G EO G RA PH Y . S U M M ER 20 0 7 involved in manufacturing the polyamide and elastane lycra, the farmers planting, tending and cultivating the cotton plants, and those getting these and other materials to the factory. This simple transaction links me with hundreds, thousands, millions(?) of people across the world. If my socks could become more than mere garments – sock puppets who could talk! – what would they tell me about the conditions, education, wealth, future of the people involved in putting them on my feet (Cook et al., 2006)? This transaction links me to more than just individual people. The factory in Bulgaria, contributing to hundreds of job losses in the UK (Anon, 1999), is owned by Delta Socks, an Israeli company fighting its own battles against boycotters who have identified how its Israeli factories benefit from operating on illegally confiscated Palestinian land by employing labourers in dreadful non-unionised conditions (Scheid, 2002). The headquarters of these sock boycotters are located in London, just a couple of Tube stops away from the M&S I bought them in. Putting my foot into the oh-sofluffy, comforting sock, it seems I’m helping to perpetuate the Arab–Israeli conflict, to disrupt the lives of hundreds of fellow Brits, and to contribute to the lives of thousands in Bulgaria. Who lives, dies, profits or suffers depends, in a small part, on me. My socks have spoken, and what they have said matters. Oppression doesn’t sit well with me – and what I do with my money. I can change what socks I buy. I must change. Sacrificing quality for ethics is a small price to pay. I may be just one person, but what I do makes a difference, to a lot of people, in a lot of different places. But I’m not the only one that can or should act differently. Surely, this can’t all be my responsibility as a consumer. Others are shaping my options and they have to change too, including M&S bosses, and the people who decide what socks get onto their shelves. A new range of fairtrade cotton socks has just started to appear there (Anon, 2006a; 2006b). Would you believe it? Their marketing pitch was ‘Your M&S: Look Behind the Label’! Just what I was doing. Their cotton is grown by farmers in Gujurat, India. It’s good for them. But what about those sock workers in the UK, Bulgaria and Israel/Palestine (O’Nions, 2006)? What ‘good’ has this done them? And what should I do with the socks I’ve already got? The ones lying in my drawer? Put them on, as usual, I suppose, for a run this morning, then to walk into uni. Verrucas, dirt, cold, pain. Whenever I am barefooted, unpleasant things tend to invade my feet, and that’s why I like socks. They are barriers to my discomfort; I am secure, safe in their company. Yet, I do seem to like them a little too much. They take up a whole drawer in my room after all. I can’t imagine life without them. But socks are strange beings. In improving my life, offering comfort, warmth and protecting me against disease, they seem to have sacrificed their own identities. They are the only free item of clothing I have – free from tags, labels or any clues to their origin or even what they are made from. I have to delve deeper, literally, into my bin and retrieve the packet before I can make out that they were ‘Made in Bulgaria’. By buying them in my local Marks & Spencer store in London, I became part of an intricate and widereaching network of people and machines. In purchasing these socks, I was one of 15 million customers in one of 400 M&S stores in the UK that employ 65,000 people (Anon, 2005). The socks that ended up on the checkout conveyor-belt are part of the countless number transported from a factory in Rousse, Bulgaria, packaged by automated production lines and made by over 600 workers (Anon, 2002) who knit, sew, seam, bleach, iron, shape and sort my socks assisted by 200-needle single and double-cylinder machines (Anon, no date). Not to mention the thousands of workers in Bulgaria Many of us pay little or no attention to where the things in our lives come from. We may be concerned about factory conditions in other parts of the world, but not feel any direct sense of connection with the people working there. ‘Made in...’ labels and ingredient information don’t tell us much about these connections and relationships. But they can be starting points for ‘geographical detective work’ (Hartwick, 2000). This can allow teachers and students to piece together their understanding of commodities and their complex geographies, and provoke classroom discussion about the impacts of consumers’ decisions, which inevitably draw upon the key geographical concepts including:

Abstract: In this article, we aim to briefly introduce you to Eris’s ArcGIS Online platform. Online GIS platforms are typically far removed from the highly specialist desktop software that many teachers today trained on. ArcGIS Online is an effective and efficient learning tool, which when used alongside Esri’s wealth of resources and support, can provide students with a sound introduction to GIS to enhance their skills and foster curriculum knowledge development.