Nice lesson today, got a bit excited about identity at the end!

I started the lesson with homework (strange, I never know what audience to write for…), it is the collaborative write-up of our ‘My Place’ questionnaire, see under ‘Work Set’.

We then used a selection of newspaper articles to discuss the local issues that Ilkeston faced, along with this we considered the different groups of people that may be concerned with such issues.

From the articles we devised a list of local issues facing the community

• The impact of Tesco on the health of the High Street, including the loss of some well-known multiples.
• The prospect of the train station reopening in the town.
• The problem of Ilkeston’s built environment, and the need to balance redevelopment with heritage.
• The impact of the decline of secondary manufacturing, particularly Stantion Steel and the less recent decline of the textiles industry.
• Issues related to low order crime, gangs and drugs culture.

We then considered our notion of ‘local’. I showed my local area that I produced using Maps Live. Oh, I’m not that draft to put a pin on my actual house.

Basically, we mapped places that we used regularly and felt particularly comfortable within. We used coloured dots, it was exciting! We then drew lines from our homes to the selected places, finally we constructed a boundary to show the area covered by our ‘local’ places. The results were fascinating.

Some people had small, concentrated and localised areas, I suppose ‘immediate local’.

Whilst some people reflected my ‘wider local’.

Others though, had a number of factors that influenced how they defined local, including family, clubs etc, this resulted in quite large ‘local’ areas.

Of course, we considered two issues with this exercise

• The area covered by our ‘local’ construct, may not necessarily include areas that we know or feel comfortable within.
• The maps may have limited some of our ‘local’ areas.

I really enjoyed this afternoon and the handing in of some good homeworks finished it nicely.

Remember your part of our survey write-up needs to be completed by 20th February 2006. The task and excel sheet can be found under ‘Work Set’.

Snow is on its way… Snow is on its way…;)

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Posted in Lesson evaluations, My place
Written on Tue, 06 February 2007 at 7:53 pm

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