United+Kingdom


 * What follows is yet to be organized and cited. It will be soon.**


 * Unlike the United States, geography has continued to have a strong presence in the United Kingdom curriculum.
 * The National Curriculum names geography as a core subject.
 * The steady growth of geography as a school subject since the 1870 Education Act is clear.
 * In the middle of the twentieth century a regional approach found favour that emphasised the detailed description of places. Partly in response to a growing sense of ennui towards the regional approach, and partly due to the need for something new in this podernising period, the 1960's saw the exciting development in both university and school geography of methods of spatial analysis which, in a broadly positivist vein, attempted to find laws underlying social phenomena. These approaches all implicitly share what we might call a naive realist epistemology with a correspondingly 'flat' ontology. In the 'capes and bays' approach there is an assumption that the world can be catalogued and memorised.
 * In the other approaches there are similar assumptions of an objective world that can be //described// in the case of the regional approach, or //explained// in the case of spatial analysis. These assumptions began to be challenged in the late 70's annd 80's with a proliferation of humanist, critical and postmodern geographies in the academic discipline that questioned and critiqued geographical knowledge and these approaches subsequently found a place in the classrooms of some progressive geography teachers.
 * However, at this stage the wheels were already in motion to introduce a National Curriculum for the first time. Walford recounts the rather torturous chain of events following the Education Act of 1988 which eventually saw geography enshrined as a compusory subject complete with a list of specified content and skills that it was to deliver. It could be argued that this effectevely put a hold on further evolutionary developments in the school subject at an epistemological level. The subject now became crystallised and static providing relatively few opportunities for students to ask critical questions about how geographical knowledge is produced and who produces it. Certainly, one thing that is particularly distinctive about the subject of geography is this most recent post-1988 phase is the relative lack of connection with what is going on in the academic discipline...The idea that knowledge is situated, relative and socially constructed has become familiar, though not uniformly accepted as we shall see. Yet school geography has carried on largely oblivious to these seismic epistemic changes in the wider discipline.
 * Standish thinks that the postmodern turn and the associated flight from truth and objectivity is partly responsible for the intellectual and moral impoverishment of geography education.
 * Morgan & Lambert: "Subjects connect us to a range of intellectual traditions, but are also shot through with arguments about how to make sense of the world. Young people need grounding in both. Acquiring knowledge, developing understanding and practising significant 'ways of seeing' contribute to the capability of people to function in society." (2009: 155)
 * Standishes point: a relativistic approach might lead our students to "an extremely disempowering and unemancipatory conclusion: If there is no truth, and no way to judge between better and worse ways of organising the social world, then why should we even bother to try and change our world for the better? However, as critical realists have shown, recognition of the socially constructed nature of knowledge does not necessarily lead to an outright rejection of the notions of truth and objectivity and it is towards further discussion of this point that the next section will turn."
 * "Critical realists have built an account of the natural and social world which attempts to avoid the extreme relativist conclusions of many postmodernists whilst simultaneously rejecting the positivist idea that we can come to have exact knowledge of the world...The basic tenet of critical realism is that the world is independent from our thoughts about it and that therefore any knowledge we have of it must be fallible. The very idea to coming to timeless truths becomes quite suspect when looked at in this way, but equally so does the voluntaristic contention that we somehow construct the world any way we want it. Critical realism lays claim to a complex and stratified sense of ontology as opposed to the flat ontology supposed by many other philosophies. This is a world consisting of many levels of reality and defined by emergence and complex causal mechanisms that cannot be reduced tot he Humean regularities beloved of positivists. Cricitcal realists make a further distinction made between the real, the actual and the empirical. The //real// names the dimension of existing mechanisms and structures along with their latent powers and potentialities which may be beyond our present experience or understanding. The //actual// names the realm of 'activated' mechanisms and structures, that is, where they are no longer latent potentialities but are actualised and have become a force in the world. Finally, the //empirical// realm is that of our experience and what we observe.
 * "There are some very inmportant consequences in all of this for education and geography education in particular. In an age in which therapeutic approaches to education have gained credence (Ecclestone and Hays, 2009; Lambert, 2011) and where self-reflection and a focus on one's own attitudes and values has become the norm in education, I think it is timely to be reminded that there //is// a world out there waiting to be observed, touched and thought about. Geography is a discipline that, perhaps more than most others, is well placed to help give us an insight into both the natural and social worlds. Moreover, thanks to the advances made in the discipline over the years, this 'insight' certainly does not have to be a brief surface inspection but rather can involve penetrating deep into the realm of the real, into the complex structures that make the world what it is. Importantly, it can also involve probing into the realm of the possible and asking how things could be otherwise if certain objects or structures were activated or deactivated. I believe that geography has a distinctive contribution to make here.As Wheelahan (2010) has pointed out, disciplines such as geography are not, as is sometimes asserted even by their advocates, merely arbitrary constructions. Yes, geographical knowledge, like other disciplinary knowledges, //has// partly been shaped through social practice (Kelly et al, 2008) but we must not forget that it is also shaped by its relationship to its intransitive object, in this case the entire world upon which we live. Forgetting this fact has led to a disciplinary solipsism that, in my view, hinders the critical potential of geography education and indeed, the project of education as a whole."
 * "...a critical realist approach to the curriculum requires that we make a commitment to objectivity and the somewhat unfashinable idea that the purpose of knowledge is to try and understand the world that exists outside and despite of us. As we have seen, critical realists believe that our present knowledge is a kind of work-in-progress towards the truth and this is indeed how I think knowledge should be presented to students in the curriculum: as imperfect, fallible, open to criticism and yet nevertheless as holding out the promise of getting us closer to the truth. If young people are provided with a high degree of acquantance with disciplinary knowledge then they will feel able to analyse, evaluate and adjudicate between competing knowledge claims and they will have been well served. They will have been given that most powerful of all gifts, that ability to break out of the world of their everyday experience and to explore critically the underlying styructures that change the world or serve to keep it as it is..."
 * "Those who would pigeonhole it under 'humanities' (and those who accept that appellation for school timetable or administrative purposes) work under a dubious 'flag of convenience' which offers little safeguard and which voyages in dubious directions. In particular, it underestimates the contribution of physical scientific work. Geography's role is surely as a bridge //between// humanities, arts and sciences; if it links exclusively into one of these areas, it loses its full impact and contribution as a holistic influence."
 * "A recent survey undertaken for //The Guardian// newspaper identified geogrpahy as the lesson //least// likely to suffer from truancy, apart from technology; all other National Curriculum subjects were rated less favourably. One obvious benefit is the intrinsic interest in and wonder of the world about which we teach; it is difficult to be a dull geography teacher - or it ought to be, if only we let the subject-matter speak freely enough through us."
 * Enlightened pedagogy alone cannot save us; the prime need is for the subject to maintain an intellectual coherenece and to have a persuasive rationale. The National Curriculum formulation went some way towards restoring balances - physical and human, places and themes, content and skills. But this will be of little avail if school geography becomes detached from the practice of the subject in higher education.
 * "I want children of the twenty-first century to understand and appreciate the world they will live in, and influence it as an individual citizen. I hope their knowledge will exceed that which was imparted to me in the twentieth century, and I hope their influence will be greater than mine."
 * "One cannot study geography without learning to appreciate the immense value of each different culture, each different landscape, and indeed every human life."
 * "Geography is the excitement of learning about, and getting to know, other places - the thrill of the world around us all. If we can impart just a little of that to children and teach them to observe the world around them more closely, we will have succeeded."
 * "I want to teach geography in order to inspire an awareness and a concern for the fragility of our common and unique environment, in the hope that future generations can learn to live in a way that avoids repeating the mistakes of the past."
 * "We have a duty to educate young people so that they have a good understanding of the world in which they live. An old Kenyan proverb states that "The earth is not ours; it is lent to us by our children". So that the next generation can assume responsibility for the earth we, as geographers, need to prepare that generation for that role.
 * "The ultimate rationale for teaching geography has to be a simple one; to give future generations the opportunity to understand and appreciate the wonders of the space and place in which we live."
 * "In an age dominated by transnational organisations, citizens of the twenty-first century must be able to acknowledge and understand each other, and geography is the ideal vehicle to achieve this goal."