Every school subject and every field of knowledge has a similar problem: What is the core knowledge that should be learned? In university courses, each student takes a different pathway through the options that are offered, and in school courses teachers and curriculum planners have to choose which ideas, content and skills should be emphasised. No student or teacher will ever have the time to comprehensively study every area of their major subjects; in fact, the longer they study a subject at university, the more they tend to increase the depth of their knowledge rather than the breadth. This chapter aims to help teachers unpack the large amount of information in the Australian Curriculum: Geography, emphasising the core knowledge and understandings. For every unit of the curriculum from Year 7 to Year 10, as well as the senior years, an interpretation of the core knowledge is presented, together with the key inquiry and skills developed within it. Following this are commentaries on examples of appropriate case studies that are suitable to achieve the aims of the unit.

Commencing proceedings is one of the most important steps in litigation and, for most cases, it signals the first involvement of the court in the dispute. However, there are important considerations for a plaintiff before commencing proceedings even when the plaintiff is confident litigation is the best way to proceed. This chapter will also consider these precursors to commencing proceedings.1

The chapter explores the nature of geography as a school subject. It reviews the five aims of the Australian Curriculum: Geography, as these are a guide for teachers in thinking about their objectives in teaching. It then discusses geography’s ways of thinking, which are based on a set of concepts that underpin the curriculum and make it distinctively geographical through the ways in which they view the world, the issues they identify as significant, and the questions, methods of analysis, explanations and criteria for evaluation they generate. These concepts are place, space, environment, interconnection, scale, change and sustainability, and they are unpacked and explained in this chapter.

This chapter addresses the place and nature of the general capabilities of the Australian Curriculum and emphasises that the general capabilities are not an ’add-on’ to the teaching of the Australian Curriculum: Geography. Rather, the general capabilities are integral to quality geographical education and have a very comfortable synergy with the aims, knowledge, understandings, skills and pedagogical approaches of the geography curriculum.

This chapter continues the analysis begun in Chapter 2 regarding the theory of civil dispute resolution (CDR). Chapter 2 focused on the many conflicts which must be balanced by governments, courts, ADR practitioners and parties engaging with CDR, and how those conflicts define and explain CDR. This chapter will consider two key principles: access to justice and open justice, which underlie our dispute resolution system and how these principles play out through policy, legal reform and practice. These principles interact in sometimes complex ways with the balancing acts discussed in Chapter 2. The ability of every member of society to access justice and the openness of the justice system are two of the most important requirements of the civil justice system but they are simultaneously complex and impossible to achieve.

Civil dispute resolution does not only occur through ADR and mainstream courts; there is also a significant volume of civil litigation heard by specialist courts and tribunals that have been created by statutes with specific and limited jurisdictions. Many specialist areas of law are dealt with by “super tribunals” run by every state and territory except Tasmania, which is committed to introducing a super tribunal in 2021. The super tribunals are commonly described as: ACAT (ACT), NCAT (NSW), NTCAT (NT), QCAT (Qld), SACAT (SA), SAT (WA) and VCAT (Vic). The state-based super tribunals are relatively recent and each deal with a number of different types of disputes which were previously dealt with by smaller, more specialised tribunals.1 Many statutory tribunals resolve disputes relating to administrative decisions by government, and government-related institutions and organisations. However, there is a wide variation in the jurisdiction of these super tribunals, with some replacing only a portion of statutory tribunals and others comprehensively replacing statutory tribunals. In addition, in some jurisdictions, the super tribunal can hear all civil disputes up to a certain threshold and effectively acts as a small claims court.

Discovery is the term used to describe the process whereby parties to litigation provide each other with documentary evidence which might be relevant to a case before the courts. Discovery of documents between parties, also called “disclosure” in some jurisdictions, is a critical part of civil litigation and a significant differentiator from ADR processes where parties rarely have access to each other’s documents.1 Where general discovery is ordered by a court, parties must provide each other with access to all relevant documents, generally including all documents on which they wish to rely in court prior to the hearing.

Over the last 30 years, information in the form of digital data has become the foundation upon which decisions are made. Governments, businesses and organisations have realised that they must have access to the right data at the right time, and also undertake differing types of analysis to make correct decisions. Data have become a part of everyday life, and the ability for all citizens to have some level of data literacy is becoming increasingly important. Data literacy in schools, or the ability to understand and use data effectively to inform decisions, will create transferable skills for students moving into the twenty-first century workforce. This means students need to be highly skilled in collecting, recording, accessing and representing data. Students should know where and how to access data, and how to use data to tell their story. Geography plays an essential role in developing these skills in the school curriculum, particularly in the secondary years. While ‘using data’ is a skill in many subjects, geography provides the opportunity for data to be used in real-world contexts, and the skills are very transferable for many future pathways.

The remainder of this book is dedicated to the complex, well-defined and extensively legislated processes of litigation. Chapters 9 to 16 detail the key aspects of litigation in the chronological order most civil disputes progress through. This chapter, however, introduces concepts foundational to, or recurrent in, the litigation process concerning how the key stakeholders — parties (or their lawyers) and the courts themselves — interact with each other.

The laws and rules governing the professional obligations of lawyers, including the allocation of legal costs, vary between different Australian jurisdictions. This chapter will explain the different types of legal costs and discuss generally how courts deal with costs disputes between lawyers and their clients (solicitor-client costs). This chapter will also consider how courts allocate costs between parties in litigation (party-party costs and indemnity costs), including the important impact of settlement offers on costs consequences and the growing role of litigation funders. This chapter will also consider the use of costs as both a compensatory and deterrent mechanism, including in the context of interlocutory skirmishes and personal liability of legal practitioners for costs.

Geographers have always had a love affair with fieldwork. It has been their staple since the beginning. Geography teachers have a collective understanding of and consensus about what fieldwork is and its role within their geography teaching. In its simplest form, fieldwork helps to make sense of what students learn in the classroom, but it is much more than that. Teachers unanimously affirm its central role in providing an extension to classroom learning by involving students in active data collection in the field.The importance of generating a ‘culture’ of fieldwork cannot be under-estimated. The earlier students are introduced to the expectations of fieldwork, the more effective future fieldwork activities will be, resulting in development of their skills, independence and enjoyment of the activity.

As Geography teachers, it is necessary to show students what it is that makes geography distinctive, relevant and therefore powerful. The distinctiveness and relevance of a subject is shown through both content and pedagogy – pedagogical content knowledge, powerful knowledge, powerful pedagogy – bringing content knowledge to life for students through the way the subject is taught. Imagine a geography lesson without fieldwork, or without the use of geographical tools such as maps and visual representations, or without the interpretation of information through the lens of place-based analysis, spatial reasoning and human-environment interconnections. The chapter explores the ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ of developing distinctive and powerful geography lessons through posing an overarching question for reflection: ‘What makes your geography lesson geographical?’ Throughout the chapter, the reader is challenged to reflect on and consider how they can continue to identify, maintain and build their pedagogical practice.

This chapter introduces the key types and uses of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) and their role in civil dispute resolution (CDR). ADR refers to the alternatives to litigation which individuals may wish to pursue instead of, before, or during, litigation. ADR is usually less formal than litigation — the procedures tend to be more flexible and more variable so the procedures discussed in this chapter are, of necessity, simply examples of how various forms of ADR can occur.