Effective Innovation in the Secondary Geography Curriculum

A practical guide

Charles Rawding

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134082742
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

How up-to-date is your geographical thought? Are parts of your curriculum becoming tired and out-dated?

Effective Innovation in the Secondary Geography Curriculum will help training and practising secondary school teachers understand how to evaluate and refresh their curriculum in order to ensure that what they teach is relevant, topical and creative.

Considering the latest developments in both the school geography curriculum and the field of geography as an academic discipline, this exciting new book explores how geography teaching and learning can be developed to engage secondary school pupils and better reflect contemporary society. Illustrated throughout with ideas and practical examples of how to update your curriculum easily and effectively, key topics covered include:

• Understanding curriculum theory and development;

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• Auditing and developing your own dynamic, interactive curriculum;

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• Critiquing textbooks and resources to ensure relevance;

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• Constructing and analysing schemes of work;

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• Incorporating the latest developments in the field into your teaching;

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• How to create innovative, enduring curricula for human, physical and environmental geographies.

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Providing insights into the latest thinking in geography in a concise and accessible manner, Effective Innovation in the Secondary Geography Curriculum will ensure motivating, lively and successful geography teaching and learning.

Part 1

The changing nature of Geography

Chapter 1

The changing nature of academic Geography

Introduction

This chapter begins by outlining the changing geographical paradigms within academic Geography before moving on to focus on how geographical concepts have been investigated in higher education. The second section of the chapter deliberately focuses on those key concepts which have greatest applicability to the school classroom, rather than attempting to cover all the concepts that might be incorporated into the academic subject of Geography. The final section of the chapter focuses on the underpinning methodologies of the subject.

Changing geographical paradigms

Modern Geography developed as an academic subject when interactions between the biophysical and human worlds were perceived to be sufficiently important to constitute an area for valid independent study (Matthews and Herbert 2004). The links between human activity and the natural environment were central to the subject. At the same time, early developments in the subject were closely linked to colonial expansion and imperialism. The changing nature of Geography as an academic discipline is well documented (Herod 2011; Agnew et al. 1996; Livingstone 1992), although it should be stressed that there is no one single history, but rather a multitude of narratives depicting the many strands of the subject. Nevertheless it is possible to identify major developments within the subject over time, although it might be more productive to consider them as examples of both ‘continuity and rupture in the practice of theorizing within the discipline’ (Barnes 2001: 560).

Changes in the discipline since the beginning of the twentieth century can be seen as a sequence of paradigms which have developed to achieve mainstream acceptance, then dominance, before dissatisfaction with these approaches resulted in alternatives being developed (Table 1.1). The sequencing of these dominant paradigms has clear implications for the type of Geography that Geography teachers of different ages might have experienced in their undergraduate studies, and for the type of teacher of Geography that they have subsequently become. However, caution is needed when interpreting such paradigm shifts since it is clear that throughout the second half of the twentieth century, geographers have been working within a wide range of paradigms.¹ A word of caution is also needed here about the recent proliferation of approaches to the subject. Herbert and Matthews (2004: 13) rightly state:

many of the ‘new’ positions have more to do with the sociology of education rather than with the advancement of new knowledge: individuals and groups need new niches to establish their academic credentials even if the new position may in fact be the reworking of an old theme or an oppositional stance with few foundations.

Harvey (2006: 410) comments on the ‘hyper-faddishness’ that has been one consequence of the drive to increase levels of publication as a result of the Research Assessment Exercise in the UK. More positively, it can be argued that, ‘geography is a multi-paradigmatic discipline and geographers work with different concepts of scientific knowledge and its development’ (Firth 2011b: 299).

In the period up until the 1960s, Geography adopted a regional approach which, at its best, was able to evoke vivid and compelling notions of place, often in the context of the historical evolution of regions (Buttimer 1971). However, the regional approaches of the 1950s and early 1960s were heavily criticised for being descriptive and classificatory. They were largely replaced by statistical and positivist approaches during the so-called ‘quantitative revolution’ of the later 1960s and early 1970s (Billinge et al. 1984). The quantitative revolution arose out of Geography's need to keep up to speed with developments in systems theory in Biology, Physics and Computing and resulted in statistical and positivist approaches being introduced to the subject as study of the unique was replaced by a search for scientific order. These changes also reflected developments in computing which enabled the empirical analysis of much larger datasets. Having said this, it might be wise to heed Pred's (1984: 87) cautionary observation that the quantitative revolution, ‘like any other “revolution” — intellectual, political, or economic… comprised a series of innovations that gained widespread acceptance.’ It was during this period that many of the models that subsequently filtered down into the school curriculum (see Table 2.1) were developed and adopted by geographers, culminating in the seminal text Models in Geography (Chorley and Haggett 1967). Table 1.2 demonstrates how wide-ranging these approaches were. Nevertheless, notions of gradual transition might be more useful here than ‘revolution’. For instance, Chorley and Haggett's text also discussed the development of regional geographies in chapter 12. Many of these approaches based on the construction of models continue to underpin research in some areas of Geography and in the development of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Earth Observation (EO) or remote sensing.

Table 1.1 Dominant geographical paradigms

Dates	Paradigm	Comment
Late 19th and early Exploration 20th century	Exploration and discovery, cartography	Strong links to colonialism and imperial expansion
Early to mid-20th century	Environmentalism	Determinism, possibilism, and the link between humans and nature
Early to mid-20th century	Regionalism	Detailed texts on specific parts of the earth, classifying and subdividing space.
1960s to 1970s	Spatial science	Quantitative revolution — producing general models of development as part of a ‘scientific turn’.
1970s on	A wide variety of competing paradigms	Humanism, structuralism, phenomenological approaches, behavioural approaches, process- and time-based physical geography, post-modernism

Source: Various; including Herbert and Matthews 2004, Lambert and Morgan 2011

Table 1.2 Models in Geography: chapter headings

Section 1: The role of models
Models, paradigms and the new geography	The use of models in science
Section II: Models of physical systems
Models in geomorphology	Models in meteorology and climatology
Hydrological models and geography
Section III: Models of socio-economic systems
Demographic models and geography	Sociological models in geography
Models of economic development	Models of urban geography and settlement location
Models of industrial location	Models of agricultural activity
Section IV: Models of mixed systems
Regions, models and classes	Organism and ecosystem as geographical models
Models of the evolution of spatial patterns in human geography	Network models in geography
Section V: Information models
Maps as models	Hardware models in geography
Models of geographical teaching

Source: Chorley and Haggett 1967

One consequence of the quantitative/models-based approach was a focus on pattern rather than process, something which, in turn, led to dissatisfaction with quantitative approaches. Critics argued that such approaches treated people as ‘little more than dots on a map or integers in an equation’ (Goodwin quoted in Castree 2009: 157). Harvey (1973: 128–9) provides a damning verdict on the very practices that he had espoused only a few years previously (he wrote chapter 14 of Models in Geography):

the quantitative revolution has run its course, and diminishing marginal returns are apparently settling in, yet another piece of factorial ecology, yet another attempt to measure the distance-decay effect, yet another attempt to identify the range of a good, serve to tell us less and less about anything of relevance.

Progressively, a more fragmented approach to the subject developed during the 1970s and 1980s as humanist (Ley and Samuels 1978; Buttimer 1976), structuralist (Harvey 1973) and radical (Peet 1977) geographies were developed. More recently, post-modern approaches (Harvey, 1989) and what has been termed the ‘cultural turn’ (Cloke et al. 2005) have characterised human geography, while links with the social sciences have been augmented by links to the humanities. Studies of environmental change and investigating the impacts of humans on the natural environment have become central issues for physical geography, with a significant focus on the nature and effects of global climate change (Good et al. 2011).

Human geography in higher education has altered dramatically over the last twenty years. The concerns and theories of the sub-discipline have shifted significantly during the ‘cultural turn’. There has been a shift in focus towards notions of representation and discourse (Lambert and Morgan 2011). As Castree identifies: ‘today, feminist, anti-racist, queer and green geographies (among others) have extended, complicated and enriched the critical geographical imagination’ (cited in Morgan 2002: 23). Gender and feminist perspectives have contributed a grea...