By Dr Tricia Seow, Senior Lecturer, National Institute of Education (NIE) Humanities & Social Studies Education (HSSE) Academic Group, Lin Yunqing, Research Associate, NIE Humanities & Social Studies Education (HSSE) Academic Group, Dr Caroline Ho, English Language Institute of Singapore

Geography teachers foster better student engagement and subject literacy by encouraging students to unpack the richness of data in the classroom.

Geography teachers draw upon a rich range of data representations to guide students in studying physical and socio-cultural phenomena, and interactions between people and their environments. These data representations, whether graph, map, photo, sketch, and table, are crucial in helping students learn about the exciting world around them.

Therefore, enhancing students’ literacy in geography entails equipping them with skills to make sense of and critique geographical data by extracting relevant information, identifying patterns in data, and analysing and summarising data to better understand the geographical problems.

However, many geography teachers often face challenges in guiding their students in data analyses, possibly due to the lack of discipline-specific frameworks that target talk about data. Some teachers are simply unsure of how to scaffold students’ engagement with geographical data.

This has led to our project Toward Effective Multimodal Meaning-Making with Visual Data in Geography through Productive Classroom Talk(funded by MOE Academies Fund Grant). We drew on our work with six geography teachers from three local secondary schools and focused on their classroom discourses that encourage students to think deeply, articulate their reasoning, and listen with purpose. Talk Moves emerged from the ground-up analysis of these classroom discourses for understanding data, connecting data to prior knowledge, and consolidating data. We also integrated the effective use of Productive Classroom Discussion with Talk Moves to guide the knowledge construction with data in the geography classroom and identified Talk Moves for sharpening students’ language use.

Talks Moves for Geographical Data, Productive Classroom Discussion and Sharpening Language Use

A three-part series, Talk Moves for Geographical Data, was subsequently developed to provide teachers with useful examples of:

1. how to use Talk Moves strategically to encourage students to actively engage in data analyses;
2. how Talk Moves can help students account for a phenomenon and provide a well-supported answer; and
3. how Talk Moves encourage students to construct a written response using the appropriate disciplinary language.

The videos featured our partner teachers from Jurongville Secondary School and CHIJ Secondary (Toa Payoh), with whom we collaborated for a year supporting their use of Talk Moves in geography classes that reaped rewarding learning experiences for both teachers and students.