Teaching Secondary Geography as if the Planet Matters

John Morgan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136682155
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

'Teaching Geography as if the Planet Matters provides a timely outline of powerful knowledge and arguments that will be needed to counter a strengthening of current curriculum orthodoxies. Not until school geography undergoes the revolution that this book outlines can it honestly claim to be contributing to more sustainable futures.' - John Huckle, Visiting Fellow at the University of York and was formerly Principal Lecturer in Educaton at De Montfort University.

We are surrounded by images and warnings of impending environmental disaster. Climate change, famine, population growth and urban crisis coupled with more recent financial chaos all threaten our sense of what it will be like to live in the future.

This thought-provoking text looks at how Geography teachers can develop approaches to curriculum and learning which help students understand the nature of the contemporary world. It sets out a model for teaching and learning that allows teachers to examine existing approaches to teaching and draw upon the insights of geography as a discipline to deepen students' understanding of urban futures, climate change, 'geographies of food' and the 'geographies of the credit crunch'.

Features include:

• examples of suggested teaching activities
• questions and activities for further study
• detailed case studies
• sources of further reading and information

The true worth of a school subject is revealed in how far it can account for and respond to the major issues of the time. The issue of the environment cuts across subject boundaries and requires an interdisciplinary response. Geography teachers are part of that response and they have a crucial role in helping students to respond to environmental issues and representations.

Section two: Themes

CHAPTER
4
	Inescapable ecologies?

Most geographers seem to go about their work with an easy conscience. The self-image of the geographer at work appears to be one of doing good. Tune into any discussion among geographers and as likely as not the discussion unfolds from the standpoint of the benevolent bureaucrat, a person who knows better than other people and who will therefore make better decisions for others than they will be able to make for themselves.

(Harvey, 1974: 22)

In 1974, David Harvey wrote an article entitled, ‘What kind of geography for what kind of public policy?’ Harvey discussed the ways in which geography as an academic discipline had become incorporated into the concerns of the state. According to Harvey, in the period 1930–70, education became increasingly geared to producing individuals who contribute to the ‘national interest’. For instance, universities produced geography graduates trained in the fields of urban, regional and environmental management. Education was increasingly seen as training in technical competence. These tendencies seem to contradict the image of the benevolent bureaucrat that Harvey suggests is the preferred image of geographers, but humanism in geography developed as a necessary counterpoint to the creation of wealth. Humanism thrived and prospered in universities, and though Harvey thought that it was threatened, he argued that the concern with the technics of urban and environmental management brought geographers into contact with other humanistic strands of thought associated with social reform and welfare. Harvey argued that these two strands – the economic and the humanistic – were in tension, but at the individual level were resolved through the strategy of separating ‘fact’ and ‘value’. If geography is a science, and therefore concerned with facts and models, we can relegate our humanism to personal opinion, to be expressed outside geography but not within. Harvey argued that the problem with this approach was that, from the late 1960s, the idea that science is neutral or value-free was challenged by the idea of science as ideology. This meant that the struggle over relevant geography was not really about relevance, but about what was relevant geography, and to whom? Were geographers to serve the interests of capital and the corporate state, or other interests? In other words, what type of geography for what type of public policy?

The question of relevance figures strongly in present-day discussions of school geography. Teachers and curriculum planners routinely talk about making the subject relevant to the lives of students. Harvey argued that the geography of the time served to produce a technically efficient bureaucracy that could manage the market economy in the interests of powerful groups (the ruling elite). It was therefore relevant to the needs of that elite, but it was not relevant to what Harvey regarded as the wider public interest. It did not, for example, teach students what to do about social injustice or ecological disharmony. This raises the question of to whom current forms of school geography are relevant.

In the 1980s, a small number of geography educators took up Harvey’s ideas and explored them in relation to the school geography curriculum. It is important to understand something of what was happening at that time. The social consensus in which it was assumed that all groups in society were broadly progressing in wealth and welfare was being fractured. In 1976, the Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan had inaugurated the so-called ‘Great Debate’, in which he argued that education was not meeting the needs of employers. Education, he argued, should be more vocational and geared to the world of work. On top of this, society seemed to be becoming a more violent and unruly place. Adult authority seemed to be eroding in the face of an irreverent media culture, and there was talk of a ‘crisis of youth’. As the 1970s ended and the 1980s started, economic recession led to high young unemployment, rapidly rising social inequality, tensions in inner cities and environmental deterioration; teachers and schools were increasingly urged to teach a curriculum that was relevant to the needs of capital. Education was to be more vocational and focus on basic skills. Some geography teachers, especially those teaching in large urban centres, questioned the relevance of school geography, which seemed remote from the lives of young people growing up in a divided society. One part of this was the emergence of ecological issues. Nuclear power, agricultural intensification, factory closures all seemed to be marginal to an outdated geography curriculum.

These ‘radical’ geography teachers challenged the idea that geography lessons offered a neutral representation of reality. For example, in the conclusion to his book The roots of modern environmentalism, David Pepper (1984) argued against the idea (proposed in 1973 by the green economist E.F. Schumacher) that, in the drive to realise a socially and ecologically balanced world, education is the greatest resource. Instead, in line with Harvey’s argument, Pepper stressed that education is geared to the needs of capitalist society and promotes ideological views of society and nature.

According to Pepper, one of the most important ways it does this is through omission, by which education frequently fails to encourage critical awareness and an ability to think in new and creative ways. It does this by emphasising the techniques of how to do things, but neglecting consideration of values and morality. Hence it does not encourage pupils and students to question received and conventional wisdom. In the school curriculum, the ideology and methods of empiricist science hold a good deal of influence, and this encourages the separation of fact and value. It makes values a matter of opinion for our spare time, while ‘facts’ constitute the legitimate object of the academic’s professional pursuit.

However, ideological teaching is not simply a matter of omission. In addition, Pepper argues, the dominant ideas taught in education are the ideas of the dominant capitalist group in society. This group is represented by the corporate state. Education is used to transmit information down to individuals about what is right for the ‘national interest’. Like the corporate state, education is dominated by the ethics of rationality and efficiency – it seeks to enhance the interests of the corporate state through (1) enhancing competition and economic growth; (2) managing cyclical crises in the economy; and (3) defusing or containing discontent. One way in which this happens is to neglect or discourage any serious thinking about the social and political organisation of society. More positively, this may be through teaching certain values that support capitalist ideology (for example, in geography exercises that encourage students to act as entrepreneurs to decide the best location for a factory; or that assume that firms should decide for themselves how to reduce pollution).

As well as the content of the curriculum, school work is organised to prepare students for the demands of the world of work. The curriculum is written and handed down from on high by ‘experts’. School subjects are presented as a package or product – received consensual knowledge – and not as a process that mediates an active reading and writing of the world. School work is fragmented, standardised and routinised (and, some would argue, this is increasingly true of university education). Externally imposed curriculum goals are carried out in a standardised and fragmented way, and that ‘knowledge’, reduced to the status of a commodity, is consumed by more or less passive students, or ‘customers’.

The result of all this is that, despite many hours spent in school classrooms and geography lessons, the vast majority of students leave without a realistic grasp of the social and political forces that shape their lives. In a subsequent article entitled ‘Why teach physical geography?’, Pepper (1986) analysed the London Board’s A level examination syllabus and papers, and argued that, because they failed to encourage critical questioning, the physical geography taught was ‘conducive to the stability of the existing economic and political order’ (Pepper, 1986). In addition, it was based on a model of learning that encouraged students to learn and adapt to a particular role in society. As Pepper argues, ‘To do well you “mug-up” information and uncritically regurgitate it without reference to the broader system of which that information is part’ (Pepper, 1986).

Pepper’s analysis suggested that the physical geography papers did not allow pupils to set knowledge within the context of human society and problems. The physical environment was not seen as part of a system that also contains human society. Students were encouraged to be analytical rather than synthetic; reductionist rather than holistic. The questions split knowledge into little information ‘bits’, such as how stream load and discharge are related, or the ‘five stages of coastline development’. There was little room for seeing how these bits fit together. Pepper concluded:

You need neither technical skill nor critical faculty to do the paper; no comprehensive overview, no sense of ‘relevance’, application or synthesis, and above all no opinions about anything. All you need is the ability to memorise and recall textbook information and recognise what pages of the book you are being asked to regurgitate.

(Pepper, 1986: 64)

In order to overcome these problems and develop a relevant physical geography, Pepper provided some examples of how topics within physical geography can be linked to broader social contexts. For example, knowledge of soil structure, texture, porosity and cation-exchange capacity is important because they are components of long-term soil fertility, which are being damaged by modern business farming, perhaps forming the deserts of the future. In arguing that the physical basis of geography is important to study, Pepper goes on to suggest that without a social purpose, there is little justification to teach physical geography. The London examination discussed by Pepper fostered ‘an uncritical, atomistic and functional approach to the physical environment which is quite divorced from its socio-economic context’ (Pepper, 1986). The physical geography described by Pepper is derived from dominant models of science education, which fail to address the societal context in which decisions are made. This type of education focuses on ‘fact’ gathering and rote learning, making students puzzle-solvers within a paradigm, rather than investigators of the paradigm itself.

These points were further developed in a series of articles by John Huckle (1983, 1985, 1986). Huckle argued that school geography served to legitimise existing economic and environmental relations. He warned that:

The ecological crisis is worsening. In recent years a series of national and international reports, including the world and UK conservation strategies, have warned of this. They have documented the growing threat to the planet’s life support processes and genetic diversity, and have called for new policy initiatives on both conservation and ecologically sustainable development.

(Huckle, 1986: 2)

Huckle adopted a materialist analysis of these developments, noting that human history is one of increasing control of nature using technology. In the process of this development, people’s relations to one another (social relations) changed, as well as their relations to the natural world. This means that it is important to understand environmental change as closely linked to changing economic structures of society. Capitalist social relations entail particular attitudes and practices towards nature. As Huckle states:

Capitalist culture is competitive, forceful and manipulative; it leads to an instrumental approach to nature which is functional, pragmatic, piecemeal and short-term.

(Huckle, 1986: 5)

This argument has important implications for education, since it suggests that to understand environmental issues, it is necessary to have an understanding of how these are linked to the political economic system that produces them. The problem is that school geography has developed in ways that prevent this type of understanding:

By diverting attention away from human agency and social explanation, school geography […] clearly acts as ideology supportive to capital. This role is reinforced by an associated economic determinism and a progressive view of social change. The image so often presented is of people and society subject to the laws of nature and market economics. Progress comes about through their progressive adaptation to these laws using ever more advanced technology. The resulting costs and inequalities are largely ignored in the benign images often presented, and the planning of such change is generally presented as a rational, consensus activity, free of conflict, racism, sexism or class struggle. Where controversy is acknowledged it is often treated superficially. Pupils are asked to discuss issues or form opinions without analysis of the relevant political history.

(Huckle, 1986: 9)

This was a far-reaching and hard-hitting critique of school geography. It is important to realise that Huckle was not seeking to criticise individual geography teachers, but was suggesting that the historical development of geography had isolated the subject from the mainstream of political and social theory that is central to understanding the causes of environmental problems. The result was that explanations in geography lessons of environmental problems related to famine, natural disasters or resource crises tended to rely on the types of ‘apolitical ecologies’ described by geographers such as Paul Robbins (see chapter three). Huckle argued that:

The ideas taught in schools too are generally based on an unquestioning view of social change and economic forces. Lessons on environmental problems tend to blame purely natural causes, or regard them as global or universal problems attributable to such causes as overpopulation, resource scarcity, inappropriate technology, overconsumption or overproduction. All such teaching fulfils an ideological role. It fails to relate issues to the different social settings in which they arise, and fails to explain how technology, consumption and production are structured by economic and political forces. Blame is effectively transferred; the crisis is attributed to nature, the poor, or inappropriate values.

(Huckle, 1988: 64)

This discussion of the concerns of writers such as David Harvey, David Pepper and John Huckle about...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Section one: Contexts
• Section two: Themes
• Section three: Practices
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index