#TMBeyond - Review 1

Just arrived back home, and am unpacking my bags, and the rather large cardboard box with what's left of the materials for my workshops that I presented at the TeachMeet Beyond on Saturday morning this week - the 5th anniversary of the first Teachmeet....
Image by Alan Parkinson

#TMBeyond was organised mainly by Iain Hallahan but with a large supporting cast, including Cassie Law and Jen Deyenberg and took a lot of organisation as always, but had a great line-up of people attending and presenting, including me...
Iain talks about the journey to Teachmeet Beyond on his blog here.....
It was a long personal journey: 770 miles there and back, but an interesting journey with lots of landmarks on the way (more on that in a later blog post)
Search the Twitter tag #TMBeyond to get a flavour for the event.

The idea was to explore OUTDOOR EDUCATION and the traditional model of Teachmeets was altered. Normally there are 2 minute and 7 minute presentations, but here, the workshops lasted an hour. The more traditional element was dealt with the previous evening around the CAMPFIRE, which I am proud to have lit... someone had to strike the first match. See picture above...

I did 2 back-to-back workshops which lasted 1 hour each.
These involved the participants in an introduction to the work that I have been doing on the Action Plan for Geography, curriculum making, and some fieldwork activities based around the Mission Explore books.
My presentation combined some material from Dan Raven Ellison that he has used with hundreds of people around the country as a manifesto for "guerrilla geography"....

I will post a version of the presentation that I used in a later blog post, as well as more feedback and the story of the event. At the same time, Cassie Law was doing a workshop on practical outdoor activities, and
Kenny O Donnell has posted a video of me in action - I had Keynote on my iPad as technical support - luckily the video only lasts for 1 minute...

My pictures are going on my Flickr page. I've started a FLICKR group too. Please add your photos to this group if you have a Flickr account...

In the afternoon, Jen Deyenberg did a geocaching workshop, and Juliet Robertson looked at numeracy outdoors....
There was also a workshop from Kim McIntosh of the JOHN MUIR AWARD in the morning - which has some interesting parallels with some of our work...

More to come in future blog posts...
Big thanks to everyone involved...

Comments

Thanks for making the effort to come all the way from Norfolk!

Long live Mission Explore!
Alan Parkinson said…
Thanks Juliet. It was worth the journey to spread the word of what the GA and I have been up to, and the work of the Geography Collective has gone down very well everywhere :)