I lived and breathed Wales, but I didn’t understand it until I became a geographer. Why students need more than lived experience to truly know their world

 

We often talk about children coming into the classroom with a rich bank of lived experiences — memories, observations, conversations, journeys, emotions. In geography education, I call this  the “geographical rucksack”: everything a child already knows (or thinks they know) and have experienecd about where they live and how the world works.

But here’s the truth we hesitate to say out loud:

Children don’t automatically see their world through a geographical lens.

Yes, they have experience — but experience alone doesn’t equal understanding. Without structured geographical thinking, lived experience can actually trap young people into one narrative, one explanation, one perspective. Misconceptions can become deeply rooted simply because they’ve never been challenged.

Living somewhere is not the same as knowing it.

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🔍 The danger of a single, unexamined story

A child growing up in a seaside town might think tourism = summer jobs and seagulls.
A child in a rural village might believe farming is “just what people do here”.
A child in a post-industrial valley might hear that the mines closed “because of the Tories”.

All of these are examples of partial truths — real experiences, but not yet geography.

Because without geographical education, young people rarely see:

• the economic forces shaping employment

• the global systems influencing place

• the environmental consequences of decisions made decades earlier

• the way space and power are deeply connected

And often, children have absorbed only the loudest local narrative — perhaps missing seeing the bigger picture.

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🌄 My own story: growing up in the Rhondda

Some of my earliest memories are from the miners’ strike. I grew up in Meardy in the Rhondda. I knew what was happening: the pits were closing, jobs were disappearing, families were struggling, people were leaving.

What I didn’t know — because no one had taught me — was why.

The explanation I heard most often was: “Thatcher and the Tories.”
That was the story. That was the answer. That was all we were given.

It wasn’t until secondary school — until I was taught geography — that I began to understand the global processes behind it all:

• deindustrialisation

• energy policy

• globalisation

• shifting economic priorities

• environmental impacts of fossil fuels

I spent years proudly defending coal because it was what my community was built on. Only later did I understand its role in pollution, climate change, and political conflict. I hadn't been wrong — I had been incomplete.

I lived and breathed Wales, but I didn’t understand it until I became a geographer.

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🧭 Why this matters for every geography classroom

This is why geographical knowledge cannot be left to chance.

It is not enough to throw children into an “enquiry” and hope they find the answers through discovery alone. Enquiry is powerful — but only when children have the knowledge capital to make sense of what they are exploring.

A well-taught geography curriculum does two things simultaneously:

1. Builds powerful, substantive knowledge
   (so children understand processes, connections, and causes)

2. Uses thoughtful enquiry to deepen curiosity and independence
   (but only after the foundations have been laid)

A child can’t ask meaningful questions about place until they know something about it.
You cannot enquire into a void.

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🧠 The role of the teacher: not a facilitator, but a geographical guide

Geography teachers hold the key to transforming lived experience into geographical understanding. We don’t just ask questions — we equip children with the lenses to answer them.

We help them see:

• beyond their postcode

• beyond the headline explanation

• beyond experience into interpretation

Because one day, every child will stand somewhere — a valley, a city, a coast, a street — and something will click:

“I’ve lived here my whole life… but now I understand it.”

And that is the moment geography stops being a subject and becomes a way of seeing the world.

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🌍 If this resonates…

This post is adapted from a chapter in my upcoming book — a book for teachers who want to equip young people with the geographical knowledge they deserve, not just the experiences they already have.

📖 If you believe geography is more than colouring maps and “where is this country?”,
📖 if you're tired of enquiry being misunderstood as “just let them discover”,
📖 if you want to build curriculum that changes how children see the world…

Then this book is for you.

➡️ Visit the pre-order link
➡️ Share this post with a geography colleague who will get it

Because one powerful sequence of geography lessons can do more than teach content — it can reframe a child’s entire sense of place.