Friday 14 November 2014

Development

At the SATIPs conference at the RGS this week Dr Andrew Lee introduced the delegates to this excellent BBC Four video featuring Hans Rosling.



The clip makes an excellent starting point to a lesson on development and it brings up so many social and economic issues:

  • Social and economic disparities
  • Impacts of war and disease on life expectency (watch Belarus, Ukraine and Russia c1940)
  • Uneven development within countries
  • Resource-rich countries (Follow the green dots)
  • Convergent economies

If you wish to manipulate the graph yourself in a lesson then go to Gapminder.com whic will let you move backwards and forwards along the time line, identify the countries and also track their progress.

I particularly like this clip as a useful tool to help teach 'Good Geography': you can see patterns and then have to investigate the processes that caused them. There is also extrapolation or application, when Hans looks to the pattern in 2050 ...

Share and enjoy!