Teaching Geography in Secondary Schools

A Reader

Margaret Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134508860
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A companion to Aspects of Teaching Secondary Geography, Teaching Geography in the Secondary School: A Reader brings together a wide range of key writings that look at central issues, debates and ideas surrounding geography education today. It encourages students to reflect critically upon the issues in order to develop their understanding of these issues and to consider the implications for their classroom practice.

Section 1

Geography in the school curriculum

This section puts the development of geography as a subject in the school curriculum into its historical perspective and examines the influence of social, economic and political influences on the subject. It is hoped that the discussions in the three chapters that make up this section will encourage students to understand better what they see happening in school geography departments, and to develop their own personal views on the role and purpose of teaching geography in secondary schools.

In Chapter 1, Ashley Kent, writing from a personal viewpoint as head of the Education, Environment and Economy section at the Institute of Education, University of London, provides an overview of the development of geography education through the twentieth century. In particular he draws out the historical roots of many of the contemporary challenges facing the subject in schools. His chapter sets the scene for this book: it covers changes in pedagogy, content, resources, fieldwork and research, and he concludes by setting out some of the broad issues and challenges that face teachers of geography in the years ahead.

Eleanor Rawling, in Chapter 2, focuses more particularly on developments that have affected the geography curriculum in the last decade from the first National Curriculum for Geography and through the two subsequent revisions. She highlights more general issues about ideology and the politics of curriculum change during this period and she raises a number of issues and topics that provide a stimulus for further debate and research. For beginning teachers, this chapter will help in understanding the thinking behind the curriculum developments and initiatives with which they will be working in the classroom.

The last chapter in this section is one that encourages students to keep an open mind about what constitutes school geography. John Morgan traces the conflicts and debates that have characterised the various ‘geographies’ of the last 150 years, and notes that traces of many of these viewpoints still survive in the geography curriculum. He suggests analytical frameworks that students can use to make sense of the various types of ‘geography’ that they will encounter in their teaching.

1 Geography
Changes and challenges

Ashley Kent

The story of Geography’s development as a popular subject in English schools is both fascinating and complex. This author’s view is that it is both worthwhile and useful to have some historical perspective on contemporary challenges. This chapter attempts a personal overview of the evolution of geography education and this inevitably is influenced by the writer’s long-standing involvement with the Institute of Education as both student and member of staff.

A number of publications have discussed the history of geographical education but probably the most succinct and accessible are the four articles by Boardman and McPartland (1993a, 1993b, 1993c, 1993d) in successive issues of Teaching Geography, to mark the centenary of the Geographical Association (GA). Marsden too has written about the history of geography education in various places, for instance 1995, 1996 and 1997. The most recent and substantial work is that of Walford (2000) and unsurprisingly Balchin’s history of the Geographical Association (1993) is a story closely intertwined with the subject’s evolution.

Curriculum development

During most of this century regional geography has been the dominant paradigm in school curriculums.Akey influence was Herbertson, former Director of the School of Geography, Oxford University, whose seminal paper in 1905 divided the world into major natural regions. ‘It is probable that his influence on what was taught in British schools was enormous and has since been unsurpassed’ (Graves 1975: 28). This was not only because he used modified natural regions in his successful series of school textbooks (written with his wife), but because the concept was used in textbooks written by schoolteachers. For instance Brooks, Pickles and Stembridge produced a textbook series covering continent by continent. Indeed the prolific textbook writer Dudley Stamp acknowledged his debt to Herbertson and the natural region concept in 1957. A good illustration of the longevity of the regional framework underpinning syllabuses was the success of Preece and Wood’s The Foundations of Geography (1938), which was still in print 50 years later having sold more than 2 million copies.

‘The dominance of the regional framework in syllabus design continued during the post-war years’, according to Boardman and McPartland (1993b: 65). As recently as 1960 the Ministry of Education lauded the regional framework, which it claimed lay at the ‘very heart of geography’ (1960: 38). The main criticism of this approach was its lack of intellectual challenge and that it tended ‘to degenerate into the repetitive learning of factual information’ (Boardman and McPartland 1993a: 5). Some argued that the sample studies approach was introduced as a counter to the disadvantages of the regional approach. The argument went that such a detailed study of any geographical unit such as a farm, village, valley or factory required the knowledge and understanding of ideas and concepts that could be generalized and ‘was grounded in the lives and occupations of real people in real places, giving it the sanctity of authenticity’ (Boardman and McPartland 1993b: 65). The ‘study’ element of sample study implied data description, analysis and evaluation. So successful was this approach that its popularity ranged from Fairgrieve and Young’s Real Geography, the first of six books to be published in 1939, to the Study Geography series of five books by Rushby, Bell and Dybeck (1967).

Over the years, books written for geography teachers have been influential on practice and have reflected the content and pedagogies of their times. One particular early moment was James Fairgrieve’s Geography in School, first published in 1926 and running to a fourth edition in 1937. He had left William Ellis School in 1912 to become a lecturer in the London Day Training College (later to become the University of London Institute of Education). The book presented his views on geography as developed over 20 years at the Institute and contains the well-known remark that ‘The function of geography is to train future citizens to imagine accurately the condition of the great world stage and so help them to think sanely about political and social problems in the world around’ (Fairgrieve 1926: 18). Geography in School remained the ‘bible’ on geographical education for several decades and a flavour of his thoughts is included in the following.

Geography is at once one of the most important of school subjects and one of the most difficult to teach.

There is a claim from geography for a place in the curriculum, not because it pays, but because we cannot have an education worth the name without geography.

Geography enables man to place himself on the world and to know where he stands with regard to his fellows, so that he will neither exaggerate nor diminish his own importance; it enables us to understand other people, to some extent, by comparison with ourselves. By a study of geography we are enabled to understand facts without a knowledge of which it would be impossible to do our duty as citizens of this very confusing and contradictory world.

There is not one single thing which stands so much in the way of social and international advance as a lack of knowledge of geography. The function of geography in school is to train future citizens to imagine accurately the conditions of the great world stage, and so help them to think sanely about political and social problems in the world around.

(Fairgrieve 1926)

His influence on geography teachers through teacher educators at the Institute continues through the generations. So Scarfe was a student of Fairgrieve, Honeybone a student of Scarfe and Graves a student of Honeybone, each respectively head of geography at the largest university school of education. Incidentally Long and Roberson were students of Scarfe! Perhaps it is no accident that generations of Institute (and wider) students (including this author) can recall one of his maxims that one should teach:

• from the known to the unknown;
• from the simple to the complex;
• from the indefinite to the definite (an unexpected reversal here);
• from the particular to the general.

Perhaps the zenith of Fairgrieve’s approach and the regional framework underpinning curriculums came with the publication of Long and Roberson’s Teaching Geography in 1966 in which the authors significantly remarked, ‘we have nailed our flag to the regional mast, and those who would not place the main emphasis on regional geography in school must justify themselves with some other viable philosophy’ (1966: 24).

Already the ‘new geography’ of higher education in the USA and the UK with its emphasis on theoretical models, conceptual frameworks and quantitative techniques was influencing a new generation of teachers unhappy with the idiographic regional approach. Seminal publications of the time were Frontiers in Geographical Teaching (Chorley and Haggett 1965); Locational Analysis in Human Geography (Haggett 1965); and Models in Geography (Chorley and Haggett 1967). Their messages were new, challenging and difficult. ‘The books … contained ideas of baffling abstruseness and exciting novelty in about equal parts’ (Walford 1989: 310). Bringing this new ‘content’ into schools was no easy task and a key role was played by the Geographical Association Models and Quantitative Techniques Committee set up in 1967 and the special edition of Geography (January, 1969) focusing on such developments. Everson and FitzGerald, two young London teachers (and subsequently HMIs), had a considerable influence especially through the first A level textbook on the new geography, Settlement Patterns (1969).

Arguably within ten years a paradigm shift had occurred in terms of changed syllabuses and textbooks in the direction of the ‘new geography’. Examples of key textbooks of the time were the Oxford Geography Project (Rolfe et al. 1974) and the work of Cole and Beynon (1968), Briggs (1972), Dinkele, Cotterell and Thorn (1976) and Bradford and Kent (1977).

Already by the 1960s there had developed in higher education (HE) a backlash against the positivistic, spatial science paradigm. Behavioural geography, welfare geography, radical geography, humanistic geography, post-modern geography and new cultural geography have all had their adherents but there is, in this author’s view, no longer the relatively coherent ‘feel’ for approaches at HE level that if nothing else the positivistic geographers gave. Johnston’s concluding comment in Geography and Geographers (1979) that ‘human geography will continue branching towards anarchy’ (p.) some could argue has some present-day validity.

The content of school curriculums, it has been argued, remains more directly linked to the ‘new geography’ of the 1960s than some of the latest HE developments. This author would argue that is generally true for recent GCSE and A level cores and syllabuses as well as the three versions of the National Curriculum.

The evolution of ways of teaching and learning geography through the century can be traced via a number of important publications aimed at the geography teacher. Fairgrieve’s Geography in Schools (1926), and the UNESCO Handbook of Suggestions on the Teaching of Geography, edited by Scarfe (1951), and its successors in 1965, edited by Brouillette, and in 1982, edited by Graves, were significant contributions. Probably most influential in the 1960s were the Handbook for Geography Teachers (Long 1964) and Teaching Geography (Long and Roberson 1966). These probably represented the last of a particular approach to the content and pedagogy of geography. The 1970s saw an explosion of new books reflecting both the ‘new geography’ and newer pedagogic approaches. These included Walford (1973), DES (1972, 1978), Graves (1975), Hall (1976), Boden (1976), Marsden (1976) and Graves (1979). At the same time began an influential series of GA handbooks for the geography teacher. The first was Geography in Secondary Education (Graves, 1971), followed by Graves (1980), Boardman (1986) and Bailey and Fox (1996). As important was the publication of the Geographical Teacher in 1901 by the GA, to become Geography in 1927, much regretted by Fairgrieve who feared the dominance of the university world in the affairs of the GA, and in 1975 the first issue of Teaching Geography, edited by Patrick Bailey. This professional journal actively sought articles written by practitioners sharing successful classroom experiences and that tradition has been maintained by the GA in its ever widening range of publications geared to supporting teachers. Particular strategies have been well considered byGApublications, for instance enquiry learning (Roberts 1998); simulations (Walford 1996); fieldwork approaches (Job, Day and Smyth 1999); information technology (King 2000); critical thinking (Leat and McAleavy 1998); and values education (Reid 1996).

The 1990s have seen another mini boom in publications aimed at the geography teacher’s reflective practice. These include Walford (1999), Battersby (1995), Hacking (1992), Kent, Lambert and Slater (1996), Naish (1992), Slater (1993), Tilbury and Williams (1997), Lambert and Balderstone (2000) and Kent (2000). A microcosm of changing teaching strategies in geography education is represented by fieldwork developments. In chronological order three distinctive models of fieldwork emerged:

1. field teaching/field excursion;
2. hypothesis testing;
3. framework fieldwork.

Field teaching, sometimes pejoratively called ‘Cook’s tour’ fieldwork, has a long and established tradition. Associated with Wooldridge (1955), the objective of such field teaching was ‘to develop an eye for country – i.e. to build up the power, to read a piece of country’. It is to do with a knowledgeable, skilled and often charismatic field teacher, leading a group of students to an area with which he or she is intimately associated. F...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Abbreviations
• Sources
• Acknowledgement
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Section 1: Geography In the School Curriculum
• Section 2: Geography In (And Out of) The Classroom
• Section 3: Geography for the Twenty-First Century
• Section 4: Research, Geography and Continuing Professional Development