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ABSTRACT: This article provides a critical account of geographical education in Turkey, a predominantly Muslim country which, as a result of regional conflicts and refugee crises, is currently much in the media. The picture of geography that emerges is of a discipline well established and generally popular in the school sector, but much less prominent in universities, where its role needs to be broadened beyond providing the next generation of school teachers. Across both sectors, key challenges are the professional development of staff, teaching and curriculum modernisation and engaging with both employability and the sustainability agenda - to which neither geography nor Islamic theological teaching in Turkey have yet given real prominence. A key starting point for change in Turkey's geographical education is the need to strengthen and rationalise the professional bodies that exist to promote geography.
Introduction
Much of the published literature on geographical education is focused on western nations such as the UK, Australia, Canada and the United States (Wolforth, 1986; Rawling, 2001; Birkenhauer, 2002; Bednarz, 2003; Morgan, 2008; Maude, 2014). As a result, many of the countries that are of growing importance on the world stage remain at the margins of discussions about the teaching and future development of our discipline. For this reason the UK's Geographical Association (through this journal and elsewhere) has been among those actively seeking to address this imbalance (see, for example, Miller and Elman, 2013; Lai and Lam, 2013; Wilmot and Dube, 2015). In addition, the work of both the online journal RIGEO (with some Turkish involvement) and the International Geographical Union's Commission for Geographical Education (IGU-CGE) should also be acknowledged. The IGU-CGE 2010 symposium, held in Istanbul, reports on the state of geographical education in different countries (see, for example, Martinha, 2010; Wang and Chen, 2010). Nevertheless, much still remains to be done to extend and enrich the geographical reach of the discipline's literature base on teaching and learning in Turkey. Paradoxically, although students of geography (particularly those in higher education (HE)) are strongly encouraged to think internationally and across cultures, the discipline's pedagogic literature does not yet match the goals we set for them.
Therefore, this article attempts to redress this imbalance, add to the research evidence and provide a fresh perspective on geographical...