Learning to Teach Geography in the Secondary School

A Companion to School Experience

Mary Biddulph, David Lambert, David Balderstone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429762017
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Learning to Teach Geography in the Secondary School has become the widely recommended textbook for student and new teachers of geography. It helps you acquire a deeper understanding of the role, purpose and potential of geography within the secondary curriculum, and provides the practical skills needed to design, teach and evaluate stimulating and challenging lessons.

It is grounded in the notion of social justice and the idea that all students are entitled to a high-quality geography education. The very practical dimension provides you with support structures through which you can begin to develop your own philosophy of teaching and debate key questions about the nature and purpose of the subject in school.

Thoroughly updated to take account of the latest research, evidence and policy, this new edition reflects new developments in technology as well as current thinking on curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. Exploring the fundamentals of teaching and learning geography in school, chapters cover:

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• Why we teach geography – its purposes and intent

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• Understanding and planning the curriculum – what to teach

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• Effective pedagogy – how to teach

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• Inclusion

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• Assessment

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• Developing and using resources

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• Fieldwork and outdoor learning

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• Values and school geography's contribution to 'citizenship'

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• Professional development

Intended as a core textbook and written with both university and school-based initial teacher education in mind, Learning to Teach Geography is essential reading for all those who aspire to become able, effective and above all, thoughtful and reflective teachers.

1

Why teach geography?

Introduction

Many years ago, the geography educationist John Huckle wrote that in their working lives geography teachers

should never forget or abandon those ideals which draw us to the job in the first place. School geography has the potential to develop young people’s understanding of their ‘place’ in the world and so help form their identity.

(Huckle, 1997: 41)

This chapter will show that the sentiment he expressed then remains true today. It is essential to have ideas about why you think teaching geography is worthwhile. Those ideas may well change, and that is OK. A good teacher, one who can motivate young people and excite their curiosity in and engagement with geographical knowledge, is one who crucially can say why teaching this or that, using these or those methods, is justified. The good teacher therefore takes responsibility for what is taught. This chapter aims to put contemporary geographical education in England and Wales into a broad context. It briefly considers the changing relationship between school and academic geography and also examines what might be our rationale for including geography in the school curriculum in the first place. In particular, it opens up the debate about ‘what to teach’, arguing that effective school geography is more than mere facts and requires sustained engagement with what is known as ‘powerful knowledge’.

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:

• consider what is geography’s distinctive contribution to the school curriculum;
• contribute to the professional debates concerning the nature of geography in the school;
• understand the changing relationship between school and academic geography and connect your own academic interests with developments in the school curriculum;
• understand ‘the knowledge debate’ and how this impinges on the kinds of geographical knowledges that are taught in schools;
• locate school geography in England within a wider discourse about school geography internationally.

Thinking geographically and GeoCapability

The function of geography in school is to train future citizens to imagine accurately the conditions of the great world stage and so to help them to think sanely about political and social problems in the world around.

(Fairgrieve, 1926: 18)

This statement, published just eight years after the end of the First World War (and only seven years before Hitler came to power in Germany), still has contemporary significance. The statement expresses a goal – perhaps the overriding goal – for geography in education. It helps remind us why we are teaching geography and not something else: all children and young people surely need to know something about ‘the great world stage’. Today Fairgrieve would be more environmentally aware, and possibly more alert to economic perspectives as well as the social and political. He would surely be more aware of the global scale as distinct from the world (see Massey, 2014). But, perhaps ahead of his time, Fairgrieve also preferred to write ‘imagine’ rather than understand the world. Why?

The study of geography as an academic discipline in Britain is a relatively recent phenomenon (since roughly the latter part of the nineteenth century). Although the vocabulary of geography (e.g. place names) had been present in elementary schools since before that time, the study of geography in education (coupled to the systematic training of geography teachers) is an even more recent enterprise: Fairgrieve’s (1926) book is a useful landmark. It is also worth noting that some prestigious schools did not even teach geography as recently as the 1960s, and in some spheres geography is still openly criticised for somehow failing to perform to the same intellectual ‘weight’ as related subjects such as history. We shall spend no time in this book ‘defending’ geography from its perceived deficiencies. However, it is important for those involved in teaching geography to be clear about its purpose and to be knowledgeable about its position in the education system.

The purpose of this section is to examine the aims, or goals, of geography in education. A number of debates are explored which identify the ways in which geography can be justified as a curriculum subject. In particular, we tackle the tension (picked up again elsewhere in this book) between school geography being tailored to serve the ‘needs of pupils’ on the one hand, and school geography being shaped by developments in ‘the discipline’ (i.e. in higher education) on the other. In addition, we should not forget that school geography is undoubtedly also influenced by ideas of geography in the popular imagination (Bonnett, 2008) which sometimes reduces the subject to a category of general knowledge. But we should never overlook the fact that in the end, geography (like science, or art, music, history or mathematics) is a source of human curiosity, which is ‘fundamental to our survival’ (Murphy, 2018).

Thus, for those committed to ensuring that all young people receive a ‘broad and balanced’ education, it seems astonishing that geography would not have a role to play in the educational endeavour. Could a young person be described as ‘educated’ without knowledge ...