Landscape assessment - a forgotten tool for stimulating student inquiry?

Approaches to landscape assessment have been widely debated and, despite their usefulness in educational settings, they have generally fallen out of favour. Yet ways to record, monitor and discuss landscape quality are becoming more important as the pace of landscape change increases.
The growing prominence of ‘place’ and ‘place-making’ in geography presents an opportunity to reinvigorate landscape assessment in educational contexts. We present a tool for assessing the visual quality of landscapes, which can be adapted for use in a range of environments. We also discuss the results of a pilot study which deployed the approach. The tool can be used to monitor landscape changes and the experience of generating data, as well as the results, can be used as a catalyst for discussions about place, land-use, development and the contested nature of valued landscapes.

Keywords: landscape change, aesthetics, place, inquiry-based learning, fieldwork