The study of Geography allows students to explore, analyse and come to understand the characteristics of places that make up our world. Geographers are interested in key questions concerning places and geographic phenomena: What is there? Where is it? Why is it there? What are the effects of it being there? How is it changing over time? How could, and should, it change in the future? How is it different from other places and phenomena? How are places and phenomena connected?
VCE Geography enables students to examine natural and human induced phenomena, how and why they change, their interconnections and the patterns they form across the Earth’s surface. In doing so, students develop a better understanding of their own place and its spaces and those in other parts of the world.
UNIT 1 - Hazards and disasters
This unit investigates how people have responded to specific types of hazards and disasters. Hazards represent the potential to cause harm to people and or the environment, whereas disasters are defined as serious disruptions of the functionality of a community at any scale, involving human, material, economic or environmental losses and impacts. Hazards include a wide range of situations including those within local areas, such as fast-moving traffic or the likelihood of coastal erosion, to regional and global hazards such as drought and infectious disease.
Students undertake an overview of hazards before investigating two contrasting types of hazards and the responses to them.
Students examine the processes involved with hazards and hazard events, considering their causes and impacts, human responses to hazard events and the interconnections between human activities and natural phenomena, including the impact of climate change.
Learning Activities:
Key Skills Achieved:
To be able to conduct fieldwork at a local site and collect data; sort, process and represent spatial data related to formation of natural environments using a range of geographic techniques and media, that may include fieldwork data; identify and describe the geographic characteristics of selected natural environments in different locations at two different scales; analyse and explain data about the geographic characteristics of natural environments produced by the interaction of natural processes; apply spatial concepts as appropriate.
Assessment:
UNIT 2 - Tourism
In this unit students investigate the characteristics of tourism: where it has developed, its various forms, how it has changed and continues to change and its impact on people, places and environments, issues and challenges of ethical tourism. Students select contrasting examples of tourism from within Australia and elsewhere in the world to support their investigations. Tourism involves the movement of people travelling away from and staying outside of their usual environment for more than 24 hours but not more than one consecutive year (United Nations World Tourism Organization definition). The scale of tourist movements since the 1950s and its predicted growth has had and continues to have a significant impact on local, regional and national environments, economies and cultures. The travel and tourism industry is directly responsible for a significant number of jobs globally and generates a considerable portion of global GDP
Learning Activities:
Key Skills Achieved:
To be able to conduct fieldwork at a local site and collect data; process and represent fieldwork data related to natural environments and change using a variety of geographic techniques and media; describe and analyse data about changes to natural environments produced by the interaction between natural processes and human activity; explain how natural processes and their interaction with human activity may alter natural environments at two different scales; apply spatial concepts as appropriate.
Assessment:
Prerequisites:
N/A
Recommendations:
N/A
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