I am Alaric Maude, an Australian geography academic. For the last 20 years I have worked in the field of geographical education – helping to develop curriculum, writing a book for primary school teachers, and publishing on geographical concepts, powerful knowledge and sustainability. In 2024 I produced a book on Thinking geographically: A guide to the core concepts for teachers, published by Routledge. Some of the material in this book has been borrowed to write these blogs, but the book has significant further development of the concepts, and examples and illustrations of how they can be used.

The subject matter of geography is the world, but more specifically the surface of the Earth and its endless

variety of environments, landscapes, peoples, cultures, economies and societies. But geography is more than a broad body of knowledge of the physical and human geography of this world; it is also a discipline that uses its concepts and ways of thinking to understand this world. These are what make geography ‘geographical’, and a distinctive discipline.

My aim is in these blogs to help teachers to understand the core concepts in geography, and to teach their students to use them to think geographically.

Each blog will have a photo that illustrates some of the variety of the world, selected from places I have visited and photographed.