Introduction
There has never been a more important time to learn geography. Young people today are growing up in a world of climate warming bringing untold changes to the natural world including sea level rise, extreme weather events and changes to vegetation and animal species. Increased population and globalisation are moving people, money, ideas and cultures around the world creating conflict and complex geopolitical relationships. Young people also have unprecedented access to information; facts and figures can be dredged up from the depths of the internet to support or refute a myriad of claims.
Schools enable young people to make sense of the complex world around them, and place facts and figures into a broader framework of understanding. They help young people to find their place in a complex and ever changing world. Teachers are the key to enabling young people to learn geography. Using their knowledge and skills, they help challenge and question, engaging students in rigorous ideas.
Educational sociologist David Baker (2014) argues that mass education on a global scale has led to a âschooled societyâ over the past 150 years, the significance of which pervades every area of political, cultural and economic life. Yet despite this âquietâ educational revolution, more recent reports (e.g. Carson 2019) suggest that social media has contributed to the increasing acceptance of âfake newsâ and false knowledge claims, also impacting cultural and political norms.
The nature of a school curriculum that enables a high-quality education is changing. Views of what constitutes knowledge and how it differs from the sorts of readily available facts is contested. The balance of a school curriculum between teaching subject knowledge and developing more generic skills and competencies seems to be in constant flux. The way teachers are trained is also changing, which has the potential to influence the nature of the very teachers standing up in front of classes of students.
This book is about what we choose to teach young people in schools, why we choose to teach it and the deep thinking that teachers and school leaders do every day to ensure our young people receive a world class education. The book is focussed throughout on the notion of âcurriculumâ, a term that describes what goes on in school, what is taught, why and how learning is structured. This book also discusses knowledge, and the importance of subject knowledge in the school curriculum and how this relates to academic disciplines in universities. This is a topic of much debate in recent educational discourse (e.g. Young 2008). In âwhat are schools for?â Standish and Cuthbert (2018) argue:
Many young people entering the teaching profession are unclear about the role of disciplines and knowledge in the school curriculum⊠For those already working in the profession, including experienced teachers⊠subjects have come to be viewed⊠as a means to another end such as developing marketable skills, facilitating well-being, promoting diversity or addressing global issues. (pxvii)
This suggests that the place and value given to knowledge, subjects and some of the broader aims of a curriculum are confused, and this book explores some reasons behind why this situation has arisen, the positions adopted by various thinkers who promote alternative types of curriculum and a possible framework for thinking about the curriculum that could offer some clarity on the issues.
These issues are particularly important at the end of the 2010s. In England, the curriculum has been dominated for decades by the National Curriculum prescribing content through traditional subjects, effectively removing the need for teachers to engage in curriculum thinking of their own. As more schools are developed that are outside the influence of the National Curriculum, so the need to understand curriculum becomes more pertinent. In 2016 and 2017 reforms of examination criteria for students sitting exams at the age of 16 (General Certificate of Secondary Education, GCSEs) and 18 (A-Levels ) created a content rich curriculum. Yet the types of knowledge being promoted here seemed to place value on recitation of learnt facts, rather than seeing any role for knowledge in developing further understanding or in any way being enabling for young people. It is this latter aspiration for knowledge that has led to talk of âpowerful knowledgeâ, a term from Michael Young (2008) whose ideas are central in this book. It is a curriculum built on the powerful knowledge of subjects that invests subjects with their educational potential.
Framing many of the debates about powerful knowledge, subjects and the curriculum in this book is the âcapabilities approachâ (e.g. Sen 1980; Nussbaum 2000), applied to educational discourse. This provides a means to consider what a curriculum is able to enable a student âto beâ or âto think likeâ as a result of their education. As such, it provides a holistic view on the aims of education expressed in terms of human freedoms, and the choices that an education leads to. As a framework for curriculum thinking it is more ambitious than simply seeing education in terms of passing exams, being able to recite facts, or having a set range of skills.
This book tells this curriculum story through the school subject of geography, a subject that has been described as âone of humanitiesâ big ideasâ (Bonnett 2008), yet the teaching of which has been branded âboringâ and âirrelevantâ in the past by the British Governmentâs Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted 2011). Geography is the subject that helps young people make sense of an ever changing world, with climate change and globalisation providing a range of possible global futures, yet the subject has been accused of being âcorruptedâ (e.g. Standish 2007, 2009) by âgood causesâ. It is the powerful knowledge of geography, free from the corrupting influences of various good causes, that has the ability for pupils to develop âcapabilitiesâ through their education. When applied to the geography curriculum these are called âGeoCapabilitiesâ (e.g. Lambert 2011a), and it is this that invests school geography with its educational potential. A potential to help young people discern fact from fiction; a potential to understand the nature of the changing world; and a potential to be able to think knowledgeably, live and work in the modern world.
This book sets out to explore these ideas.
Setting the Scene: In Search of a Curriculum âBig Pictureâ
Most schools have a set of âaimsâ proudly displayed on school websites and promotional materials. Yet if the curriculum could be redesigned from scratch to meet those aims, it would be interesting to see how many schools would still end up with a rigid subject-based curriculum and not one based around skills and competencies. Subjects as the basis of a curriculum seem to have always existed, and in schools children go from subject to subject over the course of a day without any sense of an overarching bigger picture explaining why they do this, or what the connection is between these subjects and some overarching greater aim. A number of possible constructs can be used to develop a âbig pictureâ of the curriculum to provide this overarching set of ideals, not least the National Curriculum itself.
The National Curriculum
With the introduction of the National Curriculum in 1988 into all state run schools in England, the content of the school curriculum was âfixedâ into a series of ten subjects; English, mathematics, science, technology, history, geography, a modern foreign language, music, art and physical education (PE). These subjects were not new creations, but had been the basis of schooling since the turn of the century. As John White (2006) asserts âthe 1988 curriculum could almost have been lifted from the 1904 regulations for the newly created state secondary schoolsâ (p. 2). Each subject had a specified list of content, and the role of the teacher was to deliver and assess this content to children in classrooms. The teacherâs professional role since 1988 had been to identify ways of delivering this prescribed content in dynamic and engaging ways, rather than worrying about grander ideas about aims, values and knowledge content. Yet there was no overall set of aims driving the creation of the National Curriculum. As White (2006) claims:
[W]hen the National Curriculum appeared in 1988, it was all but aimless. It consisted of a range of subjects, but lacked any account of what these subjects were for. (p. 1)
Aims were not created until 1999, but this was problematic as âthe aims came after the laying down of the subjects. Almost all of these subjects had been compulsory since 1988 and dominant for decades before thisâ (Ibid., p. 4). The aims of education were therefore imposed on a curriculum structure that already existed.
By 2008, after a decade of rule by a modernising Labour government, the National Curriculum âbig pictureâ (QCA 2008) appeared, a model of the school curriculum. A clear aim of education was articulated, which was to create âsuccessful learners, confident individuals, and responsible citizensâ; the rest of the curriculum was structured to meet these aims. The âbig pictureâ, whilst ambitious, showed a lack of emphasis on subjects and knowledge. Subjects appear in a small and diminished role as part of âstatutory expectationsâ. The aims reduced education to a set of ideals, which Ledda (2007) asserted âare worse than irrelevant. They are anti educationalâ (p. 15). These aims made no mention of knowledge, or of subjects. The three aims could equally apply as aims of good parenting, rather than aims of a national education system. The school curriculum was seemingly influenced by the âlearning powerâ philosophy, summed up by this quotation from the âcampaign for learningâ (Holt 2015):
Since we cannot know what knowledge will be most needed in the future, it is senseless to try to teach it in advance. Instead, we should try to turn out people who love learning so much and learn so well that they will be able to learn whatever needs to be learned. (Holt 2015)
The view suggests that subject knowledge is irrelevant, archaic and no longer suitable for young people. It suggests that the only reason knowledge is taught to young people is in case it is âneeded in the futureâ. This perhaps explains why personal, social and health education (PSHE) and citizenship were introduced as new subjects into the National Curriculum; knowledge in these subjects has perhaps a grea...