Debates in Geography Education

Mark Jones, David Lambert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317204398
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Debates in Geography Education encourages early career teachers, experienced teachers and teacher educators to engage with and reflect on key issues, concepts and debates. It aims to enable readers to reach their own informed judgements with deeper theoretical knowledge and understanding.

The second edition is fully updated in light of the latest research, policy and practice in the field, as well as key changes to the curriculum and examination specifications. Expert contributors provide a range of perspectives on international, historical and policy contexts in order to deepen our understanding of significant debates in geography education.

Key debates include:

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• geography's identity as an academic discipline;

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• what constitutes knowledge in geography;

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• places and regional geography;

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• what it means to think geographically;

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• constructing the curriculum;

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• how we link assessment to making progress in geography;

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• the contribution of fieldwork and outdoor experiences;

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• technology and the use of Geographical Information;

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• school geography and employability;

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• understanding the gap between school and university geography;

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• evidence-based practice and research in geography education.

The comprehensive, rigorous coverage of these key issues, together with carefully annotated selected further reading, will help support and shape further research and writing. Debates in Geography Education is a key resource that is essential reading for all teachers and researches who wish to extend their grasp of the place of geography in education.

Mark Jones is Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK

David Lambert is Professor of Geography Education at UCL Institute of Education, London, UK

Part I

Policy debates

Chapter 1

Geography in the National Curriculum for Key Stages 1, 2 and 3

John Hopkin and Fran Martin

[There is] a muddled discourse about subjects, knowledge and skills which infects the entire debate about curriculum, needlessly polarises discussion of how it might be organised, parodies knowledge and undervalues its place in education and inflates the undeniably important notion of a skill to a point where it too becomes meaningless.

(Alexander, 2010, p. 252)

Introduction

At the time of writing, it is still possible to find serving teachers in England and Wales able to look back, often with some nostalgia, to teaching geography before the advent of the National Curriculum. However, in the quarter-century since its inception in the 1988 Education Act, it is the National Curriculum which has dominated discussion about what should be taught, how and by whom in primary and the early years of secondary schools. In exploring the question ‘What is geography’s place in the curriculum for Key Stages 1, 2 and 3?’, this chapter suggests that these discussions are part of several interlinked and wider debates about who constructs and develops the curriculum, its purpose and the nature of knowledge, the status of geography and the role of teachers.

To some extent these debates turn on the evolution of the Geography National Curriculum (GNC) in England. However, it is worth pointing out that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own distinct national curricula, the outcome of similar debates and decisions as in England, at policy, school and classroom level. We will turn to these debates after briefly reviewing the position of geography before and during successive iterations of the English National Curriculum.

The evolution of the Geography National Curriculum

In the years between the 1944 and 1988 Education Acts, teachers in all phases had considerable autonomy in planning the curriculum, largely free of any oversight from (or a sense of accountability to) local or central government. This was particularly so in primary schools and ‘lower’ secondary schools, whereas at age 14 pupils embarked on public examination courses, whose syllabi, then as now, largely defined what was taught. The freedom of schools and individual teachers to select aims, content and approaches ensured that pupils’ experience of geography varied considerably from one to another.

This was a period that Lawton (1980, p. 22) called ‘the golden age of teacher control (or non-control) of the curriculum’, when many schools in both phases did little to ensure progression and continuity or a sufficiently broad and balanced set of experiences for their pupils (Simon and Chitty, 1993, p. 108). Fran Martin, writing about teaching geography in primary schools before the National Curriculum, points out that this situation

gave great freedom to teachers, (but) it also meant that pupils’ experience of geography could be very hit and miss. If a teacher loved geography, and saw its relevance in primary pupils’ education, then it was included; if they did not, it was often neglected.

(Martin, 2013a, p. 17)

As HMI reports at the time showed, in primary schools geography did not always appear on the curriculum, and neither was its planning or quality of teaching consistent:

Some work of a geographical nature was undertaken in three fifths of the 7 year old classes and nine out of ten 9 and 11 year old classes … (however) much of the work tended to be superficial and there was often little evidence of progression … Though good work was being done in some classes, in the majority essential skills and ideas were seldom given sufficient attention.

(DES, 1978, p. 74)

By contrast in secondary schools, geography was a recognised part of the curriculum, ‘a popular and well-respected subject’ (Rawling, 2001, p. 9) and the focus of important debates about curriculum, pedagogy and the relationship of the subject with society. It was a period of significant school-based curriculum development in geography, with national support from the Schools Council (Hopkin, 2013a), although much of this activity focused on examination courses for older pupils.

Before the National Curriculum, this period of decentralised curriculum development brought gains such as the development of a robust model of geographical enquiry; however it also had a number of weaknesses, notably a lack of attention to place and locational knowledge, and an over-emphasis on themes in human geography at the expense of physical geography (Rawling, 2001; Hopkin, 2011). At the whole-school scale, curriculum innovation in the first years of some comprehensive schools often promoted a more cross-curricular approach. An HMI survey (DES, 1974) noted that 29 per cent of secondary schools taught geography in combination with subjects such as history and RE, leading to concerns about a loss of geographical focus and dilution of teachers’ expertise.

In 1991, the first National Curriculum, by introducing direct state control over the content of the curriculum, thus represents a very significant discontinuity to this period of curricular freedom. Its overt aims were to ‘raise standards’ and ‘develop the potential of all pupils and equip them for the responsibilities of citizenship’ (DES, 1987, pp. 2–3), as well as to remedy the very heterogeneity of approaches outlined above, and to restore a model of the curriculum based on subjects and focused on knowledge. In geography, a key concern was to re-establish a more traditional view of the subject which put knowledge and understanding of places at its heart (Walford, 1992; Rawling, 1992, 2001).

Almost from the outset, the National Curriculum was subject to successive revisions. At the time of writing, the Geography National Curriculum (GNC) had gone through four different versions for Key Stages 1 and 2 (see Martin, 2013a, b), and five for Key Stage 3 (DES 1991 [for 1992], DfE 1995, DfEE/QCA1999a, b [for 2000] and DCSF/QCDA 2007¹ [for 2008] and DfE 2013 [for 2014]). (For a more detailed account see Hopkin 2013a and Lambert and Hopkin 2014).

In part, these revisions reflect the exigencies of government policy rubbing up against the realities of school life, most evidently in the very considerable changes in the curriculum and assessment arrangements in the second (1995) version, and in the further reductions in content at each subsequent revision. In part, the changes also reflect the development of wider ideas in society, and in the case of geography, to some extent developments in the discipline as well as changes in its status. In part, they also reflect the ideological priorities of different governments, played out in different views about the purposes of the curriculum and the nature of knowledge, between central control and professional autonomy in the selection of content and approach, and between different concepts of ‘entitlement’ and ‘standards’. It is to these debates and their impact on the geography experienced by pupils that we now turn.

Debate 1: ‘curriculum as specification’ or ‘curriculum as framework’?

Successive changes to the shape and content of the GNC suggest our first, and perhaps most fundamental debate: what are the respective roles of the state and the teaching profession in specifying and developing the curriculum?

In 1991, the first GNC focused on geographical knowledge, understanding and skills, specified and assessed in great detail, allowing little space or opportunity for curriculum development by teachers. In sheer volume, as well as intent, it became a curriculum of delivery. To some extent, over successive versions the GNC developed on the basic template of the original, with considerable continuity in its basic framework of locational and place ­knowledge, ­knowledge and understanding of geographical themes and skills. This ­evolution was ­evident in:

•an increased articulation of aims for geography;

•very significant overall reductions in prescribed content, together with reductions in the detail specified and more use of illustrative examples to frame teachers’ increased choice;

•increasingly articulated geographical enquiry;

•a development of themes based on geography’s links with society and environment, and some reduction in physical geography;

•a clearer model of assessment and progression.

(Hopkin, 2013a; Lambert and Hopkin, 2014)

By 2007, these evolutionary processes created a fairly sparse framework for geography at all three Key Stages which, rather than attempting comprehensive coverage, sampled from the discipline and was thus designed to secure a basic entitlement for pupils (see Tables 1.1 and 1.2). The 2007 version of the National Curriculum was designed to strengthen the whole curriculum and cross-curricular learning in secondary schools, and coincided in many primary schools with the widespread adoption of the creative curriculum, an approach which aims to be driven by the pupils’ needs rather than subjects, in particular the skills they need to learn (Burgess, 2007). In some secondary schools, the 2007 National Curriculum also stimulated the development of generic skills-based courses and, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Abbreviations
• Contributors
• Introduction: the significance of continuing debates
• PART I: Policy debates
• PART II: ‘Classroom’ debates
• PART III: subject debates
• Acknowledgements
• Index