Academic career
After working as a secondary school teacher, Coleman became a lecturer at the geography department of
King's College London, eventually becoming professor in 1987 after other posts in Canada and Japan. She retired from full-time teaching in the 1990s.), and the
Blackbird Leys estate in
Oxford. These measures were correlated with various design features such as number of storeys, number of flats in a block etc. The findings published as
Utopia on trial (Coleman 1985) were controversial, with Newman suggesting that insufficient attention was paid to social factors interacting with the physical.
Bill Hillier of the
Bartlett School of Architecture argued that many of Coleman's findings on the link between large scale housing and social problems were a statistical artefact: simply put, large blocks have more litter than small because they are larger. Nevertheless, in 1991 the government provided £50 million to test the ideas in selected estates under Coleman's direction under the DICE (Design Improvement Controlled Experiment) project (see Coleman 1992). A significant proposal was the removal of overhead walkways linking blocks to reduce opportunities for crime, though the overall effectiveness of DICE, and the general effectiveness of physical design methods over social and economic measures remains controversial. ==Other interests==
Other interests
Graphicacy With
William Balchin Coleman coined the term
graphicacy as a characterisation of cartographic and other visuo-spatial abilities, extending across the whole field of graphical communications: 'the intellectual skill necessary for the communication of relationships which cannot be successfully communicated by words or mathematical notation alone'.
Graphology Coleman's interest in
graphology included editing and contributing to
Graphology magazine and writing a graphological thesaurus.
Literacy In 2007, Coleman co-authored
The Great Reading Disaster with Mona McNee. In it, they discuss the teaching of reading in primary schools, promoting the use of
phonics. As a teacher in
secondary modern schools in the 1940s prior to her career at
King's College London, Coleman claimed to have encountered only one pupil in 1200 unable to read. In her opinion, by 2007's standards, perhaps 30 of these would be in special schools for people with learning disabilities and a further 300 illiterate. ==Selected bibliography==
Selected bibliography
• • Coleman, A & Maggs, K.R.A (1965), Land Use Survey Handbook, fourth (Scottish) Edition, Isle of Thanet Geographical Association • Coleman, A.M & Lukehurst, C.T. (1967), British landscapes through maps, 10: East Kent: a description of the Ordnance Survey Seventh Edition One-Inch sheet 173. Geographical Association, (paperback ed) • Coleman, A.M & Lukehurst, C.T. (1974), Field Studies for Schools, Rivingtons, . • • Coleman, A.M & Shaw, J.E. (1980), Field Mapping Manual, London: King's College, ISBN • Coleman, A.M. (1985), Utopia on trial: Vision and reality in planned housing. London: Hilary Shipman • Coleman, A, The Social consequences of Housing Design, ch. 7 of Robson, B (Ed), Managing the city: The Aims and Impacts of Urban Policy, Rowman & Littlefield, • Coleman, A., Coleman, D., Beresford, P. Melville-Ross, T. et al. (1988), Altered estates. London: Adam Smith Institute, 1988. • Coleman, A. (1992a), 'The Dice Project', in 'High rise housing', special issue of Housing and Town Planning Review, London: National Housing and Town Planning Council • Coleman, A., England, E., Latymer, Y. and Shaw, J.E. (1992), Scapes and Fringes 1:400,000 Environmental Territories of England and Wales, London: Second Land Utilisation Survey (2 maps and booklet) • Coleman, Alice & McKnee, Mona (2007), The Great Reading Disaster: Reclaiming Our Educational Birthright, Exeter and Charlottesville VA: Imprint Academic, ==Awards==