Clare Brooks

Valuing initial teacher education at Master’s level

The future of Master’s-level work in initial teacher education (ITE) in England seems uncertain. Whilst the coalition government has expressed support for Master’s-level work, its recent White Paper focuses on teaching skills as the dominant form of professional development. This training discourse is in tension with the view of professional learning advocated by ITE courses that offer Master’s credits. Following a survey of the changing perceptions of Master’s-level study during a Post Graduate Certificate in Education course by student teachers in four subject groups, this paper highlights how the process of professional learning can have the most impact on how they value studying at a higher level during their early professional development.

Changing times in England: the influence on geography teachers' professional practice

School geography in England has been characterised as a pendulum swinging between policies that emphasise curriculum and pedagogy alternately. In this paper, I illustrate the influence of these shifts on geography teachers professional practice, by drawing on three “moments” from my experience as a student, teacher and teacher educator. Barnetts description of teacher professionalism as a continuous project of “being” illuminates how geography teachers can adapt to competing influences. It reflects teacher professionalism as an unfinished project, which is responsive, but not beholden, to shifting trends, and is informed by how teachers frame and enact policies. I argue that recognising these contextual factors is key to supporting geography teachers in “being” geography education professionals. As education becomes increasingly competitive on a global scale, individual governments are looking internationally for “solutions” to improve educational rankings. In this climate, the future of geography education will rest on how teachers react locally to international trends. Geography teacher educators can support this process by continuing to inform the field through meaningful geography education research, in particular in making the contextual factors of their research explicit. This can be supported through continued successful international collaboration in geography education research.

How Does One Become a Researcher in Geography Education

There is a distinction between engaging in research and being a researcher. Although practitioner research has been widely supported, it has been understood as producing different types of research findings from that of the academic researcher. In England, much of the published research in geography education is conducted by academics or educational professionals, but this is often under-resourced. In this paper, I argue that there is an opportunity to recognise the growing contribution of practitioner research in geography education. Although practitioner research is often located in a unique context, with adequate research training, individual researchers can ensure that their research makes a significant contribution to the field of geography education.

Insights on the field of geography education from a review of master's level practitioner research

ABSTRACT In this paper, I report on a review of over 400 masters level dissertations in geography education completed since 1968 at the UCL Institute of Education, London. The aim of this review is to understand how the field of geography education has been understood and problematised by practitioners within the field. Unlike the Road Map Report on Geography Education Research which reviews geography education research from a strategic perspective, this research explores the field from the perspective of the practitioners and, therefore, asks what are the issues that concern practitioner researchers. Whilst practitioners add an important perspective on the field, their concerns are often not evident in the published literature. This paper argues that the practitioner focus on “problems of the day” is a key dimension that needs to be more widely recognised in the academic literature. This goes beyond a simple definition of research as describing “what works” in education, but as part of an ongoing dialogue between research and practice that is characteristic of a practical field of research enquiry. The research contributes to our understanding of how the field of geography education (within specific contexts) is experienced and problematised by practitioners.

Geography teachers' stories of sustainability: an introduction to narrative research

ABSTRACT Geography teacher recruitment and retention is an important issue for the future of geography education. This Special Issue of IRGEE tackles this issue head on by focusing on geography teachers’ narratives about their experiences of teaching geography, and asking why some geography teachers stay in the profession while others leave. This paper serves as an introduction to this Special Issue, outlining why adopting a narrative approach enables us to gain a deeper understanding of the experience of teaching geography, and why it is important to understand the experience of those teachers who stay in the profession. The theme that emerges from this collection of papers is the significance of the interplay between context and identity when seeking to understand geography teachers’ work, and in particular why subject identity matters. These themes are echoed in the other papers of this Special Issue, indicating that now there is sufficient evidence for geography education to take the issue of teacher subject identity seriously, and for further research to consider the implications for initial and continuing teacher education.

Making the geography curriculum: reflections on the IGU-CGE London Symposium

“Curriculum making”, highlighted in the Geographical Associations Manifesto in 2009, was the focus of a research symposium held in London in April 2011. Using an auto-ethnographic approach, I reflect on and explore my experience of participating in that symposium. The analysis explores the “cultures of influence” and the “forms of problematisation” represented in the symposium papers, and argues that there is a tension between the ideas that underpin curriculum making (which focus on the actions of the teacher) and how research conducted in higher education problematises the geography curriculum. The analysis reveals three categories of “problems”: subject identity and expertise, teacher professionalism and engagement, and education policy and its enactment. In helping to understand these problems further, the research has been able to highlight the significance of local contexts in influencing and facilitating change in education, and the necessity of a productive relationship between academics and teachers.

International Differences in Thinking Geographically, and Why ‘the Local’ Matters

This chapter explore how geography teachers in four countries understand the discipline of geography and how differences in understanding may affect the representation of the subject in the school curriculum. Drawing upon an international project, using the data collected from teachers in England, this chapter focuses on the implications of these findings, by emphasising how a teacher’s understanding of geography can influence how they view and teach the geography curriculum. This research draws upon Stengel’s (Journal of Curriculum Studies, 29(5), 585–602, (1997) observations that the relationship between academic and school geography has both an epistemological and ethical dimension, and on Bernstein’s (Class, codes and control. Vol. 3. Towards a theory of educational transmissions (2nd ed.). Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, (1977) notion of recontextualisation to understand how the geography curriculum is made and defined locally. The findings reveal the significance of legacy issues within national and local contexts and how these can influence geography teachers, even if they feel a lack of agency as curriculum makers. The implications of this work are significant, as different interpretations of what constitutes geographical knowledge can be seen as barriers to developing internationally agreed understandings. This school-orientated influences can affect how young people are taught to value geography and how they are inducted into thinking geographically.

Reflecting on What Makes Geographical Thinking Powerful

Thinking geographically is a uniquely powerful way of seeing the world. While it does not provide a blueprint … thinking geographically does provide a language – a set of concepts and ideas – that can help us see the connections between places and scales that others frequently miss. That is why we should focus on geography’s grammar as well as on its endless vocabulary. That is the power of thinking geographically (p9).