Kitty Taylor

I wrote this piece in remembrance of my first month as an ECT1 and a celebration of the ‘spookiest’ months of the year.

I come to geography not as a teacher first but as a geographer. My maps were never confined to textbooks; they traced coastlines, railway lines, and the streets of coastal towns layered with memory, absence, and meaning. My PGCE year gave me purpose, but it also gave me vertigo. I felt like the narrator of a ghost story, wandering corridors I half-recognised, speaking into classrooms that sometimes seemed haunted more by expectation than by students. Certainty flickered and vanished, leaving only shadows where confidence should have been.

My grounding in human and cultural geographies became a lantern in these foggy passages. From tracing the romanticisation of railways in the south-west to interrogating the social and economic vulnerability of coastal youth, I have always sought the stories that spaces conceal. During my PGCE, and still now as an ECT1, I found myself questioning my experiences more than focusing on the boundaries of pedagogy or the rules of routine. Geography is never about mere facts; it is the art of inhabiting absence as much as presence, of reading silence as attentively as speech. In the classroom, this sensibility is both compass and charm. Even when I wandered through doubt and administrative fog, the discipline itself reminded me that questioning is not weakness, it is instinct.

Teacher trainees are often guided to follow pedagogy as though it were a well-trodden path, neat and brightly lit, yet the geographer’s instinct prefers the misted, uneven route. We are trained to notice what others overlook, to interrogate narratives, to read spaces as living, breathing texts. I often felt adrift in a sea of opinions, routines, and education-specific language, like a poltergeist pacing invisible corridors, unable to capture the passion and vigour I saw in experienced teachers. Contemporary geographies demand that we question the media we consume, the stories we inherit, and the silences we accept. In my work on heritage and memory, particularly within coastal towns, I have seen how spaces carry histories like shadows clinging to fog. During my PGCE, I had to cultivate a peculiar skill: rendering the indescribable into bullet points for portfolio tools, as if translating hauntings into checklists. Yet these experiences revealed that the classroom is itself a complex field site, one that requires the knowledge, observation, and interpretive skills akin to ethnographic writing – expertise that many teacher trainees, particularly those from a BSc background, may not have encountered before.

Critical thinking is not only a skill added to the curriculum; it is geography itself. Media literacy is not merely a ‘one-hit’ lesson, it is a way of perceiving the world, a conspiratorial reading of the texts and images that swirl around us. For teachers and trainees, navigating a classroom with a geographer’s eye transforms it into a labyrinthine field site, where every interaction, every discussion, and every unexpected disruption must be observed, interpreted, and made sense of. The classroom becomes a haunted library, a fog-bound observatory, a space where wonder and absurdity coexist, and where the ordinary demands the analytical attention and ethnographic sensibility of a geographer. It is a space that reveals itself as strange and complex, offering both challenge and opportunity to those prepared to inhabit it fully.

And yet the vertigo persists. I have felt small and inexperienced, a spectral figure roaming rows of students, my uncertainty echoing like some Gothic refrain. Perhaps my fascination with classic travel writing, which once inspired my own academic journeys, has left me attuned to the strange, the uncanny, the eerie possibilities in the familiar. But to be lost is not failure. To be lost is to inhabit the landscape fully, to learn its contours, its dangers, and its secret delights. It is here, in the tension between knowing and not knowing, that teaching becomes transformative. Each conversation, each observation, each attempt to illuminate a place or a story is a deliberate act of navigation.

Teaching has clarified what it means to be a geographer. It is to read, to connect, to question, and to interpret. It is to resist simplification and embrace complexity, whether in the layered histories of coastal towns, the narratives carried through heritage, or the mediated stories of contemporary events. In classrooms, these instincts are amplified. Students are not passive recipients but fellow explorers, mapping the strange, the eerie, and the overlooked with us. Complexity is not something to fear, it is something to inhabit, to marvel at, and occasionally to laugh at, absurdity and all.

I am always exploring; learning. My path is not linear, and the tension between purpose and uncertainty remains. Yet through this process, I have come to see that to teach is to inhabit geography fully. Being immersed in the apparent rigidity of teacher training does not diminish the complexity of the classroom or the restless, questioning urges of a geographer – both can exist at the same time, and it is precisely in this coexistence that the beauty of cultural geography reveals itself. Our discipline teaches us to question, to explore, and to connect in ways that extend beyond the classroom walls. In embracing these instincts, we can empower students to see the world with curiosity and care, to inhabit spaces ethically, and to recognize the richness embedded in every landscape, narrative, and encounter. Teaching has given me drive and a large set of goals, but it has also reminded me that the work of a geographer is never complete. It is not a job title, but a description of character, temperament and being. It is ongoing, reflective, and above all, profoundly human.