GA Annual Conference 2026

This session will provide practical guidance and reflection on how you can design lessons and schemes of work that include everyone. It will demonstrate how to create lessons that embed students’ personal development, protected characteristics, SMSC and British Values. We will also consider how to ensure geography makes a difference to all students - and includes rather than excludes - through understanding of diversity and inequalities and by tackling ‘wicked’ issues around colonialism, women’s rights, racism, sexuality and gender identity. We will show how good geography lessons can open eyes and minds to how geography has shaped our perspectives on who we are and what we think of others. 

This session will explore how integrating personality inclusion into geography education can make a profound difference to students’ engagement, well-being and future prospects, especially for those who identify as introverts or experience disadvantage in education. As Founder and lead consultant of The Introvert Space™, I will share inclusive teaching strategies that honour quieter voices and foster psychological safety in geography classrooms. Drawing from real-world case studies and practical tools, the session will help educators recognise and nurture introverted learners’ strengths, from deep thinking to reflective curiosity. Aligned with the Conference theme, I will demonstrate how an inclusive geography curriculum enhances cultural capital, builds confidence and creates space for thoughtful dialogue around global challenges like the climate crisis. Attendees will leave with actionable insights to support personality diversity in fieldwork, classroom discussions and assessment.

An active session focusing on strategies used in ITE at the University of Worcester to normalise nature connection, from origami and storytelling to 'nature natter' cards. The session will explore the rationale for building nature literacy into our classroom spaces and processes, highlighting the five pathways to nature connectedness, as well as inviting participants to try a variety of activities, develop their own 'nature natter' questions and communities of practice, and engage their imaginations in ways to normalise nature for ourselves and our pupils. 

In this session, the editorial team from the student journal Routes will share what they’ve learned about supporting high-quality geography through publishing sixth-form and undergraduate geography work, and what lessons we can share to ensure that geography is accessible and makes a difference for all.

Co-planning is an approach to mentoring that encourages teachers to develop lessons collaboratively and benefits both mentors and mentees. This workshop will provide everyone who engages – mentors, ITE tutors, ECTs and trainees – with critical questions to support thinking about the use of AI to support co-planning conversations. Participants will take away strategies they can put into practice.

This session will explore strategies to use models, hierarchies and categories in a way that challenges their power to marginalise and misrepresent countries, futures and, most importantly, the individuals in your classroom. By understanding the power held in typical geographical systems of classification, we can begin to see where these labels limit and misrepresent the potential for specific contexts and whole regions of the world, while also continuing to misrepresent and exclude the students who may identify with these regions and contexts. This session will share key resources and strategies for the classroom, giving time to consider their use, strengths and limitations. Participants will leave with deeper understanding, new strategies and more confidence to make their geography classrooms a more inclusive space.

In a teaching and learning landscape suffering from increasing prescription and instrumentalism, many teachers have found their professionalism and, ultimately, their agency stifled. Drawing on findings from doctoral research, this lecture will outline how geography teacher agency can be comprehended, discuss which components geography teachers identify as important for shaping their agency, and explore how geography teachers navigate their working environments to allow agency to manifest. It will then consider the implications for agentic teachers’ teaching practices, focusing on what achieving agency means for the geography that is taught to students. A powerful geography education can genuinely make a difference to how the next generation interact with our increasingly uncertain and risky world, and this lecture will advocate for the importance of agency as a transformative tool for both teachers and students and as a means to equip young people with the tools to navigate the challenges of the future.

The session will focus on understanding autism, including the potential opportunities and challenges that autistic people may experience in the geography classroom and in fieldwork. The participation section will provide an opportunity to share best practice, further attendees' knowledge and understanding of autism and outline strategies to apply both in the classroom and in leading a geography department.