The Core Knowledge is not just about passing the Institute of Tourist Guiding’s exam (though we do want that for you of course!); it gives essential national context with key facts, themes and stories that help explain why the places we visit look, work and matter as they do today. More detailed regional understanding can be developed from the Core Knowledge and these lessons should support and guide your own research.
Throughout our Core Knowledge module, the lessons will be delivered in a variety of ways – using presentations, short videos, text or a combination of them all. At points during the lessons you will be asked some questions, or have tasks to complete – perhaps to bring with you to the live Zoom session. Please do not skip any of the lessons, even if you feel you know the content – you may well miss something you don’t know or could do with revising.
Some of the Core Knowledge lessons will be bigger and longer, and contain more content than others, so we really recommend making a start as soon as you can after the lesson is published on the Learning Portal. In the live Zoom session associated with each lesson, we shall be discussing the lesson, having quizzes, sharing our tasks and answers or thoughts on the Reflective Questions, asking our own questions and so on.
We have separated the Core Knowledge Module into lessons with different themes, as you have seen from the list on the Core Knowledge page. But of course, in real life, and in guiding, everything is not an isolated subject. Architecture, for example, is not separate from history or geology or geography, and when we are guiding we combine all of the themes to tell a complete story about the places to which we take visitors. For the purposes of study, the separate lessons are necessary – but as you go along do continue to make those connections between them all.