What's your view? Curriculum ideologies and their impact in the geography classroom

Headnote

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...