Content area
The discussion in the workshop highlighted: * that some schools have been forced to offer a three-year GCSE geography course in order to fit in the exam content * a rigid teaching of only the examined content without the ability to teach beyond the specification * an over focus on examination style questions in lessons. [...]it enabled them to see how their underlying ideas about their subject and its aims could influence them in the classroom. Acknowledgements Thanks to trainee geography teachers at the South East England training hub at St Andrew's School, Leatherhead, for taking part in the training and agreeing to have their work presented, and to those who attended the workshop at the GA conference, as well as to Duncan Hawley for advice on the training session. Email: [email protected] References Cotti, R. and Schiro, M. (2004) 'Connecting teacher beliefs to the use of children's literature in the teaching of mathematics', Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, 7, pp. 329-356.
Richard presents the outcomes of a teacher training exercise with a group of beginning teachers in which they were asked to plan a lesson through a particular ideology to show just how much of an impact the ideologies can have.
The way we view the teaching of geography can have a huge impact on the types of lessons we teach. Many of us choose to introduce young people to the complexities of the modern world because we want children to live in a world that is fairer or more equal. For others, it is about passing on a body of knowledge to the next generation, and inspiring them in the same ways we were inspired as children. For others still it may be the vocational elements of the subject - providing our students with skills for the future workplace - that give us the drive to teach every day. These differing views of teaching geography, encapsulated by the notion of curriculum 'ideologies' can have implications for the sorts of lessons that we teach, and thus the geographical experience of our students.
Curriculum ideologies
A curriculum ideology can be defined as a set of beliefs about the aims of education; what individuals, educational institutions, and particular subjects aim to teach and why. Schiro (1978) and Cotti and Schiro (2004) identified four main ideologies underpinning the school curriculum. These 'reflect different epistemological beliefs regarding schooling, teaching, learning, childhood, knowledge, evaluation, and education in general' (Marlucu and Akbiyik, 2014, p. 200). Rawling (2000) adapted this classification to school geography and identified a series of ideologies which she said had impacted on school geography from the 1970s to the year 2000 (Figure 1).
Lesson planning activity
After an initial discussion to explore their reasons for becoming teachers, a group of trainee geography teachers were introduced to this list of ideologies. They were asked to see if they could match their initial notions of why they became a teacher with any of the positions identified. We also discussed the extent to which they felt their placement schools, national government and even their teacher training institutions had a particular ideological positioning.
Most of the trainees described themselves in progressive educational or 'child centred' terms, describing their reasons for going into teaching being about the social development of the child. Yet despite only being in schools for a few weeks they felt this was at odds with the aims of their placement schools, which seemed focused on examination results and ensuring the students had skills for the workplace ('vocational training' ideology). They also felt that the new GCSE and A level courses seemed more content-heavy than the courses they themselves had experienced at school and felt this was a return to a 'cultural restorationism' perspective.
The trainees were asked to plan a lesson for a class of mixed-ability year 9 students on 'managing climate change'. This topic was selected as it often features in key stage 3 geography lessons and, as a contemporary element of the subject, it was also hoped the trainees would have a good understanding of the topic. As it turned out, their knowledge of climate change was mixed, but this provided a rich opportunity to discuss the role of subject specialists in the classroom. The trainees worked in pairs on their lesson, but each pair was given a different ideology on which to base their lesson aims and objectives. They then had to present, justify, and critique their lessons to the rest of the group.
Results
Three of the lessons are presented in Figure 2, along with an explanation of how the trainees interpreted the lesson aims to fit the ideological perspective they were given. They also critiqued their lesson.
Discussion
The trainees' lessons all derived from their understanding of what these ideological perspectives might look like in the classroom. As such, it was asking them to plan a lesson that might not be the way they would choose to teach this particular topic; in fact, very few of the groups wanted to teach what they had planned as they saw problems with their approaches.
When presenting and discussing their lessons a recurring key idea was the differing importance different ideologies placed on geographical knowledge. They felt the perspective of 'cultural restorationism' presents knowledge to students in an uncritical way, asking them to accept ideas as facts, as if geography exists as a 'body of academic knowledge' that can be passed down generations. By their very nature, textbooks can often be guilty of trying to present the world in this way. Conversely, some of the lessons they had planned could be taught without any real understanding of climate change (such as the child-centred perspective shown in Figure 2). One of the trainees admitted she did not know much about climate change, yet felt she could teach the lesson she helped plan. However, she recognised that her lack of knowledge would hinder her students' understanding of climate change over successive lessons.
Towards a new ideology?
I had the opportunity to run this activity with a group of more experienced teachers as part of the GA's Annual Conference in 2018. While the sorts of lesson outcomes were vaguely similar to those produced by the trainees, what was significant was the subsequent discussion which was critical of Rawling's list of ideologies. This list was produced in 2000, and one of the key features of the past two decades has been an increasing pressure felt by teachers to achieve examination grades. This was felt to have impacted on the curriculum taught to students. The discussion in the workshop highlighted:
* that some schools have been forced to offer a three-year GCSE geography course in order to fit in the exam content
* a rigid teaching of only the examined content without the ability to teach beyond the specification
* an over focus on examination style questions in lessons.
This pressure seemed to cloud any other ideological perspectives to the extent that a new 'exam focussed' ideology was suggested to sum up the experience of some teachers over the last twenty years. There was a feeling by those in the workshop that this was an ideology imposed by external pressures of league tables and results and not one that was an aspirational ideological position for teachers! Much more research is needed with a wider research base before any attempts can be made to update Rawling's list, but the comments from these experienced teachers has started the process.
Conclusions
The exercise with the trainees helped them in two main ways. Firstly, it enabled them to see how their underlying ideas about their subject and its aims could influence them in the classroom. However, they felt that having recognised this influence would enable them to overcome it as and when they wanted, using other perspectives in their teaching to offer students a different view. The trainees were forced to think about their own approach to teaching geography; those who initially identified with a 'child-centred' ideology saw its limitations in discussion.
The second way the exercise helped the trainees was by enabling them to see how important subject specialism in the classroom is. Geography is not a 'canon' of uncritical knowledge that needs to be learnt and passed on (as might be an interpretation of cultural restorationism), but nor can it be ignored in favour of developing a range of social skills (as might occur in a purely progressive educational ideology). Subject specialists help students to engage with the 'powerful knowledge' of geography (see Young and Lambert, 2014), ensuring it helps them to engage critically with the world in all its complexity. The trainees reported that they knew of non-specialists teaching geography in some of their training schools, and felt these teachers often taught 'progressive' child-centred lessons with a lack of geographical content, or whose over-reliance on textbooks led them to teach geographical facts uncritically.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to trainee geography teachers at the South East England training hub at St Andrew's School, Leatherhead, for taking part in the training and agreeing to have their work presented, and to those who attended the workshop at the GA conference, as well as to Duncan Hawley for advice on the training session.
References
Cotti, R. and Schiro, M. (2004) 'Connecting teacher beliefs to the use of children's literature in the teaching of mathematics', Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, 7, pp. 329-356.
Marulcu, I. and Akbiyik, C. (2014) 'Curriculum Ideologies: Re-exploring prospective teachers' perspectives', International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 4, 5 (1), pp. 200-206.
Rawling, E. (2000) 'Ideology, politics and curriculum change: reflections on school geography 2000', Geography, 85, 3, pp. 209-220.
Schiro, M. (1978) Curriculum for better schools: The great ideological debate. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications.
Young, M. and Lambert, D. (2014). Knowledge and the future school: Curriculum and social justice. Bloomsbury: London.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to trainee geography teachers at the South East England training hub at St Andrew's School, Leatherhead, for taking part in the training and agreeing to have their work presented, as well as to Duncan Hawley for advice on the training session.
Copyright Geographical Association Summer 2018