The two Year 8 boys behind QE’s Geopolitics Club staged a successful quiz to share their passion with their peers.
Ibrahim Syed and Azaan Haque promoted the lunchtime quiz to Year 7 and 8, who turned out in numbers to answer the questions, raising money for Greenpeace in the process.
Headmaster Neil Enright said: “With geopolitics at the forefront of so much of the news at the moment – from conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East, to the Red Sea and the recent election in Taiwan – it is important that our pupils understand how place and space interconnect with politics and international relations.
“Well done to the two organisers! We have many pupil-run clubs, and this is a great example of students taking leadership in offering opportunities to share their interest in a topic with their peers, thus creating additional enrichment activities. It was also lovely to see other boys supporting those efforts through their enthusiastic participation.”
Geopolitics is defined as: political activity as influenced by the physical features of a country or area of the world; the study of the way a country’s size, position, etc. influence its power and its relationships with other countries.
Ibrahim and Azaan were assisted by QE Flourish tutor Eleanor Barrett, who is also a Geography teacher.
“They approached me to help organise payment, booking the Main Hall and supporting in the promotion and running of the event,” she said.
“They worked hard to create a PowerPoint quiz and serve as quiz masters, and they were rewarded with a brilliant turn-out.”
“The material, looking at global relations and geographical influences, was very advanced for Key Stage 3.”
The quiz included individual question rounds, team rounds and a buzzer round. It started with the basics (What do you think geopolitics is? was the first question, for one point), but quickly moved on to more advanced questions (for example, The Strait of Gibraltar separates the Iberian Peninsula from which African country?).
Among the attendees was Priyankan Ampalavanar, of Year 8, who said: “The geopolitics quiz was not only a very riveting experience, but it also broadened my mind to how aspects of geopolitics are intertwined with our daily lives.”
The event raised more than £50 for Greenpeace. It was the second year such a quiz has been run.
Braving a biting chill on the beach, the Sixth Form group investigated not only the threat posed by rapid coastal erosion at Walton-on-the-Naze, but also evaluated steps being taken by the town’s authorities to check it.
Walton has one of the fastest retreating cliff lines in the British Isles: on average, the cliffs are retreating between one and two metres every year. That the cliffs are falling away so rapidly is due largely to their geology.
“However, the formations unfortunately represent a relatively weak barrier to coastal erosion.”
“Although no fossils were recovered, the fieldtrip was a great success, and despite the weather being bitterly cold, the boys demonstrated admirable fieldwork skills in sampling and collecting their data before analysis back in the classroom,” said Mr Butler.
Among them is Year 11’s Chanakya Seetharam, pictured right, who gave a presentation on Geography through a Marxist lens. He said: “As a keen geographer, I have never been particularly given to the perception of Geography as somehow a ‘soft’ subject. The club provides an indisputably rigorous and academic forum, in which to discuss topical geographical issues.”
All Year 12 AS Geography students made the journey to Wandsworth for the human geography fieldtrip. They will be assessed on the fieldwork completed in their AS examinations next summer.
Sajjad (OE 2009–2016), who graduated in Human Geography from Durham University, highlighted how media portrayals often create negative perceptions of refugees, often showing them either as a threat or as merely passive receivers of aid.
His aim, he said, was to “unveil narratives that are often not shown by the general media”. How refugees are represented is very important, he averred. Sajjad noted that ‘flooding’ metaphors are often used in reference to refugees, implying that they present a problem which is “overwhelming and uncontrollable”.
The events, which are part of QE’s partnerships work with the local community, are aimed at giving Year 5 girls and boys an early taste of secondary school education.
The first of the three days was the ever-popular Primary Forensics Workshop. The visitors were tasked with completing a number of experiments and analyses to work out who had murdered the Headmaster!
Boys from Year 12 helped staff run this workshop, engaging with the children at each station.
Firstly, teams were given the challenge of designing a castle on paper. They had to base their design on a certain set of criteria and follow a budget, requiring them to decide which features they wanted to prioritise.
There was then a Sustainability Challenge run jointly by Geography and Economics. The children had to work in groups and devise a sustainable product. They designed their product, chose a logo and decided on their target market. Then each group presented to the other children in attendance. Among the ideas generated were: a mobile phone where the case is a solar panel and charges the phone, and a ‘plastic’ bottle where the bottle itself is biodegradable.
Zhuoer Chen, of Year 9, and Sarang Nair, of Year 7, were among just ten finalists nationwide.
The competition, which is part of Christ Church’s outreach work, was open to all UK state school pupils in Years 7–10. Entrants had to submit a video 2–5 minutes long on a geographical issue or phenomenon that was local to them.
The video compared average yearly temperatures at Greenwich weather station with those at Calgary and found they were 11.35C higher.
The 20 Year 12 geographers were able to inspect two World War II pillboxes that had fallen off the cliff at Walton-on-the-Naze and are now exposed by the sea at low tide.
The party stayed in the Grade I-listed Flatford Mill. Today owned by the National Trust and leased to the Field Studies Council, the mill was owned by successive generations of the Constable family and was the subject of one of John Constable’s most famous paintings, completed in 1816.
Featuring photography and a number of essays, the exhibition, which marks the tenth anniversary of the nuclear disaster and the earthquake and tsunami that precipitated it, is being held at the Royal Geographical Society in London. The earthquake and tsunami killed more than 15,000 and triggered a triple meltdown at the power station, forcing 200,000 people from their homes.
The exhibition, entitled Picturing the Invisible, sees his research interests coming together with his longstanding engagement with the London art scene: while in the Sixth Form at QE, he took part in in the Royal Academy’s attRAct programme and in the Louis Vuitton Young Arts Program; he has also been an Event Manager at the OPEN Ealing community art gallery.
On their Human Geography trip, A-level students investigated gentrification in Wandsworth, where they met residents only too willing to share their views on how their area had changed.
The field trip helped to consolidate boys’ understanding of rivers, which they had previously studied in a unit titled Physical Landscapes of the UK.
More recently, this month’s visit by Year 12 and 13 pupils to south London had as its goal exploration of the question: To what extent has Northcote ward undergone the process of gentrification? The visit was for part of a unit of study for the Edexcel A-level course entitled Regenerating Places, under which the sixth-formers are looking at the London boroughs of Wandsworth and Newham.