A Guide to Educational Research

Peter Gordon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136897498
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This account of development in educational research is intended as a guide to possible research areas, both fundamental and policy-related, for students in colleges and higher education institutions, and should also be of interest to those engaged in curriculum planning and administration.

1

GEOGRAPHY

Bill Marsden

The last three decades have been a period of continuing change in geography: in geographical research, geographical education and geography teaching. In 1972, the Geographical Association published two sources of reference about research and publication in geographical education, respectively by Graves and Lukehurst¹ and by Naish.² These both drew attention, among other things, to work in the history of geographical education; in the relationship between school geography and developments at the research frontiers; in the purposes and justification of geography in the school curriculum; in the development of children’s thinking and geographical education; in methods of teaching geography; in geography’s cross-curricular links; and in its contribution to international understanding. These all remain significant issues. The interlocking facets of frontiers’ geographical research, the mediation of geographical educationists, and aspects of teaching geography in school will be explored chronologically, starting with the dramatic changes in geography and education in the 1960s. The criteria of evaluation of each phase of change will be focused on the following key variables:

(a) Geographical distinctiveness

(b) Educational value

(c) Social relevance.

There will be, finally, in the light of the consideration of each phase in the changing ‘state of the art’, an appraisal of research in geographical education and suggestions for a possible agenda for development in the politicised climate of the 1990s. In support of the discussion overall, there will be reference to what must be inevitably a selective review of contributions to the literature in what has always been a complex and contested curriculum debate.

THE CHANGING ‘STATE OF THE ART’

1 The 1960s: Conceptual Revolutions

(a) The ‘New Geography’

Criticisms of the old regional geography paradigm gained momentum in the universities of Britain during the 1950s and 1960s, and culminated in an academic revolution. As is well known, the focus of geography was as a result shifted from the study of unique places to the investigation of more general patterns in space, and from the traditional methodology of an areal synthesis to statistical and other analytical methods imported from mathematics and the physical and social sciences. This was the ‘new geography’, the product of the ‘quantitative revolution’.

Likewise in schools, rigid and outmoded regional studies remained dominant in the early 1960s.³ True, a more ‘enlightened traditionalism’⁴ had gained some ground, based on fieldwork at home and on case-studies of detailed localities further afield. These benefited from improvements in technology which made possible more vivid presentation of distant places in the classroom. In the world of the ‘new geography’, as it spread into the more prestigious secondary schools, even this approach was dismissed as idiographic and therefore suspect.

One of the advantageous features of the ‘new geography’ was the stimulus it gave to communication between teachers in universities, colleges, and independent and state schools. University geographers assisted dissemination in schools in a way that had not been witnessed in half a century. Joint conferences of schoolteachers and academic geographers were arranged.⁵ The January 1969 edition of the journal Geography was devoted to these new developments, and included contributions by academics such as Chorley and Gregory, and also from teachers and college lecturers who were important influences in disseminating the new geography into schools. They included Everson, Fitzgerald and Walford. Another important influence was the American High School Geography Project, led by a notable American geographer, Helbum,⁶ whose materials demonstrated ways of translating the ideas drawn from the academic frontiers fairly directly into school practice. Many school texts devoted to the new geography appeared during the 1970s, from Everson and Fitzgerald,⁷ Bradford and Kent,⁸ Briggs⁹ and others. There was even a pioneering primary series, New Ways in Geography, by Cole and Beynon, which is still in print.¹⁰

This is not to say there were no opposing currents in the waves of enthusiasm for quantification and discovering patterns in space. They included the die-hard traditionalists, whose preoccupation had been with writing massive regional texts. But they also included those who, like Alice Garnett,¹¹ foresaw a fragmentation of the discipline and a loss of distinctiveness, through the increasing and ‘well-blinkered’ specialisation she discerned among younger academics.

(b) Curriculum Theory

While geographical educationists of the 1960s were discovering names such as Chorley and Haggett, they were also becoming acquainted with some equally influential educationists, well-known in the United States, but new to us in Britain, including Bloom,¹² Gagne,¹³ Tyler,¹⁴ Taba,¹⁵ Bruner¹⁶ and Phenix.¹⁷ They offered models of rational curriculum planning, based on specification of objectives related to a psychology of teaching and learning. Their frameworks demanded not only a consideration of the fundamental aims of education, but also the translation of these aims into more detailed operational objectives. These in turn were to be linked with a selection of content (drawn from ‘areas of experience’ or ‘disciplines of knowledge’), and a selection of learning experiences (based on an evaluation of the capabilities and interests of pupils). The resulting programmes of study were to be evaluated for diagnostic purposes, and fed back into the system as evidence for making changes. As we shall see, the objectives model, though much criticised by ‘educational progressives’, was to have a crucial impact on geographical education and the curriculum in general in the 1970s and 1980s.

In terms of our three criteria, the shift from traditional regional to quantitative geography, to an extent, represented:

(i) A retreat from distinctiveness, in that the heart of the subject, that is the synthesis of physical and human elements of geography through place, was lost in the rush to highly specialised systematic studies.

(ii) An enhancement in educational rigour, though with an inbuilt element of élitism. Given the priority of the desire to improve the intellectual standing of the subject, it was predictable that the quantitative revolution in schools should be widely regarded as being more appropriate to more able than less able pupils.

(iii) A detachment from social relevance, in the emphasis on abstract patterns and aggregation of evidence. To many, the human face of geography, as well as its traditional distinctiveness, was at risk.

2 The 1970s and early 1980s: Convergence and Divergence

(a) The Work of Geographical Educationists

During the 1960s, the culmination of the ‘enlightened traditionalism’ previously cited was perhaps best represented by Long and Roberson’s methodological text, Teaching Geography (1966).¹⁸ This laid stress on fieldwork and sample studies. During the 1970s, a shift of emphasis can be identified between Bailey’s methodological text, similarly entitled Teaching Geography,¹⁹ which stressed the geographical dimension in geographical education, including the ‘new geography’; and those of Graves, who was one of the first to draw together the positive aspects of ‘enlightened traditionalism’, the ‘new geography’ and, above all, curriculum theory, in methodological texts with titles subtly different from those of Long and Roberson, and Bailey, such as Geography in Education,²⁰ and Curriculum Planning in Geography.²¹

A similar approach was offered in Marsden’s Evaluating the Geography Curriculum,²² Its structure was based on current models of curriculum planning, stressing the importance of curriculum theory as well as geographical content. Like Graves’s Geography in Education, it explored historical as well as contemporary contexts. It also paid more attention than hitherto to the importance of good assessment practice, another educational issue of moment in the 1970s. Hall, in Geography and the Geography Teacher,²³ covered many similar elements of curriculum study as applied to geography, and also appraised the examination system and the ongoing Schools Council projects in the subject.

Geographical educationists were also involved during the 1970s in editing a growing series of texts which brought together a range of issues relating to geography and education, as seen through the eyes of different writers. Examples of such texts were the collections by Bale, Graves and Walford,²⁴ Graves²⁵ and Williams.²⁶ Papers of the first Charney Manor Conference, which brought together academics, geographical educationists and teachers, were published in Walford’s New Directions in Geography Teaching.²⁷

In terms of our criteria, these works in general gave considerable priority to the educational dimension, stressing the importance of rational curriculum planning, of taking account of the needs of the child, of promoting meaningful learning, and of enhancing teacher skills. They offered, in general, cautious support for the ‘new geography’, but were equally concerned to maintain the benefits of ‘enlightened traditionalism’. They contained more than a hint of the importance to come of new trends towards social and environmental relevance.

(b) Schools Council Projects

These methodological texts hardly had the direct impact on geography in schools as the government-funded Schools Council projects of the 1970s. Geography was a particular beneficiary of Schools Council sponsorship, with no fewer than four development projects:

(i) Geography for the Young School Leaver (GYSL), from 1970 at Avery Hill College of Education, London, directed by Rex Beddis, designed to meet the needs of less able children.

(ii) Geography 14–18, from 1970 at the University of Bristol Department of Education, directed by Gladys Hickman.²⁸

(iii) History, Geography and Social Science 8–13, from 1971 at the University of Liverpool Department of Education, directed by Alan Blyth.²⁹

(iv) Geography 16–19, from 1976 at the Univ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 GEOGRAPHY
• 2 HISTORY
• 3 ENGLISH
• 4 MUSIC
• 5 RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
• 6 SCIENCE
• 7 TECHNOLOGY
• 8 ECONOMICS and BUSINESS EDUCATION
• 9 MODERN FOREIGN LANGUAGES
• 10 EDUCATION POLICY
• 11 CURRICULUM STUDY
• 12 CHILDREN’S LEARNING
• 13 SPECIAL EDUCATION
• 14 GENDER
• 15 COMPARATIVE EDUCATION
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
• INDEX