ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the issues involved when using and in writing geography textbooks for the 11-19 age range. It expresses the author's personal views and opinions fashioned during thirty years of teaching geography and over eighteen years of writing geographical textbooks. The author prefers to use what he considers to be the more appropriate, and user-friendly, terms, that is workbook/activity book. Teachers, examination boards, publishers, authors, geography advisers and OFSTED officials all seem to agree that many geography textbooks contain insufficient case studies and that these are also often too short and over-simplified. The real breakthrough for author came in the early 1970s with the development of the School's Council Geography for the Young School Leaver Project (GYSL), which later became the Avery Hill Project (AHP). A good text book should provide sufficient core material, together with case studies and questions, to allow teachers to extract what are relevant to their needs and to which they can add their own resources.
