We have always been realists

I’ve been reading Stuart Jeffries’ (2021) new book – Everything. Now. Everywhere – which is a history of postmodernism. I’ll write a review of this soon, but in this post I want to make a comment about how, from the mid-1990s, any discussion that might have taken place about postmodernism (for the sake of brevity I will use postmodernism here rather than make distinctions between postmodernity and postmodernization, and I won’t talk about the relations between postmodernism and post-structuralism – these will have to wait) in geography education were abruptly closed down so as to ensure that there was a return to ‘realism’. This has been the story of the past two-and-a-half decades: the battle for realism in school geography.

For a brief moment, in the 1990s, postmodern geography offered some ‘interruptions’ to school geography. First, there was the idea that the various ‘paradigms’ that had defined Anglo-American human goegraphy since 1945 – postivism, humanism and structuralism – were all quintessentially ‘modern’ geographies in that they all attempted to ‘tell the truth’ about the world, put it in some sort of order, and improve it. In a context of ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’, they were all guilty of closing down difference. Second, all these represented ‘Geography with a capital G’ when in fact there existed a whole range of ‘little g geographies’. Most geography had been written by WEIRD people (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic), and surely it was time to recognise the variety of ways in which people could become geographical (about this time the field of animal geographies -in its modern version – was founded, leading to what we recognise now as ‘more-than-human-geographies). Third, and this is what I want to talk about here, was the idea that there was no necessary relationship between geographical langauge and the ‘real’ world out there.

The extent to which these postmodern theses represented a threat to the mainstream of thinking about school geography is a question for another day, but here I want to focus on the counter-reaction, which was to reassert the importance of realism. This has not been straightforward movement, but viewed from a wide angle, it is there nonetheless.

The return to the real can be seen as a response to the fragmentation of the curriculum field and geography as an academic discipline. As I have intimated, the 1980s and early 1990s saw the re-making of human geography in which geography aligned itself with – and even led the way for the spatialization of – social theory. At the heart of realism is a claim to be able to ‘know’ the world.  There is, of course, an important sense in that geography has always been ‘realist’, with a commitment to what has been termed ‘naïve realism’:

“..with the collaboration of others, with the aid of improved instruments, we can establish the ‘real’ nature of the physical world. Geographical facts of observed phenomena and changes within them can be objectively established and any question of unseen entities, problematics , abstract forms or subjective impressions are irrelevant.” (Gibson, 1981:152)

The great thing about this form of naive realism is that it provided the basis for the development of school geography as useful subject in the school curriculum. But it also meant the subject was cut off from wider debates within the philosophy of science. The discipline had to wait for the ‘correction’ offered by David Harvey’s (1969) Explanation in Geography which shifted the focus from description to explanation (it was eagerly consumed by geography teachers keen to establish a more scientific basis for their subject). Whereas the explanations sought were for topological patterns on the Earth’s surface, later forms of realism looked beneath the surface for explanation. An early example was Massey’s (1984) Spatial Divisions of Labour which insisted that the real mechanisms to explain spatial patterns had to be looked for in social relations – critical realism in embryonic form.

From that point onwards, Geography’s engagement and eventual marriage with social theory advanced at breakneck speed. There are plenty of geographical readers from the 1990s that tell the story (Tim Unwin’s The Place of Geography probably remains the pick of the bunch).

However, the breakdown of any explanatory whole, the multiplicity of perspectives, and the sense that reality was somehow buried deep in the psyche all challenged the sense that there could be a centre for geographical study (I recall being mystified upon my first encounter with Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift’s edited collection (1995) Mapping the Subject.). At this point, there were calls to return to the ‘real’ business of describing and explaining the world and its patterns. So, although in 1989 Rex Walford (an influential figure in the field if ever there was one) was writing with Derek Gregory about the need for a continued engagement with the research horizons, and about how geographical language was not a representation of reality, by 1995 he had returned to the ‘world-as-exhibition’ that underpinned spatial science, albeit with a commonsense educational humanism at its heart. Thus his 1995 article (co-authored with Peter Haggett) in Geography on the future of geography imagines a world awash with information just waiting to be taught by a new generation of keen geography graduates. As Gwyn Edwards (1996) noted in his response, this was an idealization and a fantasy, but it was echoed by Haggett (1996) in his later discussion. This too, is cited by Rawling:

“we need to conserve and re-emphasise some central and cherished aspects of geographical education, a love of landscape and of field exploration, and fascination with place, a wish to solve the spatial conundrums posed by spatial configurations” (Haggett, 1996)

For her part, Rawling was insistent on the need to be ‘absolutely clear’ about what constitutes the core of geography. Thus, commentators such as Marsden, Walford and Rawling were united in calling for geography teachers to avoid the pitfalls associated with postmodernism.

The problem was that this appeared as the last vestiges of a more innocent geographical imagination, and was not convincing at the very moment geographers were discovering the duplicity of landscape, feminist geographers were challenging the masculine gaze of fieldwork, and writers such as Harvey were arguing that the only interesting questions to be asked about place were how they were socially constructed.

So what has all this to do with Geography. Teaching. Now? Well, these arguments have been taken to their logical conclusion in the face of a disintegrating economic system which has radicalized young people. There’s a vocal and ‘influencing’ set of commentators who point out how Geography’s past as an oppressive and imperialist discipline means it is today apt for deconstructing – is Eliot-Hurst’s (1985) famous delcaration that ‘geography has neither existence nor future’ coming to fruition? Geography has even been blamed for the Brexit vote. The intellectual cutting-edge is represented by a series of revolutionary feminisms and black geographies that seek to decolonize the discipline. This is realism, but not as we know it.

Against this are posed the equally real but more monolithic structures of ‘social realism’, offering to define once and for all what is it that makes geographical knowledge powerful. In its wider – Young-inspired – educational version social realism attempted to resolve the tension between the fact that knowledge is simultaneously a social construction and a solid entity with a permanance and life of its own, but to date in geography much of the focus has been on trying to discern or codify what this might look like. The social in social realism is rarely examined, and there is a danger of spatial fetishism – a more sophisticated way of saying that geography matters.

Which brings us to the one realism that dare not speak its name – capitalist realism – the term popularized by the late Mark Fisher (2009) and which takes its cue from Frederic Jameson’s comment about it being easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Capitalist realism is what makes it hard for us to think that we couldn’t possibly explain to students in geography lessons about the deep (but discernable and comprehensible) forces that are shaping ‘the ways of the world’, that there is always another viewpoint of geographical ‘value’ to be taken into account, another voice to be sought out and heard, and more layers of complexity to be cut through. In case that reads like a criticism of geography teachers, it is not: Fisher’s point about capitalist realism is that it is a structural and ideological reality that prevents us accessing the deep levels needed to think outside of it.

Perhaps, in the context of a world that is driven by the singular force of a capital that must reproduce itself and its in-built growth imperative, the time has come for an ‘ultra-realist’ school geography, one that is insistent in analysing how capital is re-shaping the material and psychic spaces and places in which we live. The term is taken from the cultural criminologists Steve Hall and Simon Winlow, and points us to a geography concerned less with awe and wonder and more with shock and awe.

References

Edwards, G. (1996) Alternatiive speculations on geographical futures: postmodern perspectives. Geography 81, 3.

Eliot-Hurst, M. (1985). ‘Geography has neither existence nor future. In. R. Johnston (ed.) The Future of Geography. London: Methuen.

Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist realism. London: Zero Books.

Gibson, E. (1981). ‘Realism’. In. M. Harvey and P. Holly (eds.) Themes in geographic thought. London: Croom Helm.

Haggett, P. (1996) ‘Geography into the next century: personal reflections’. In. E. Rawling and R. Daugherty (eds.) Geography into the twenty-first century. Chichester: Wiley.

Harvey, D. (1969) Explanation in Geography. London: Edward Arnold.

Jeffries, S. (2021). Everything. Now. Everywhere. London: Verso.

Massey, D. (1984). Spatial divisions of Labour. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Pile, S. and Thrift , N. (eds.) (1995) Mapping the subject: geographies of cultural transformation. London: Routledge.

Unwin, T. (1992). The place of Geography. Harlow: Longman.

Walford, R. and Haggett, P. (1995). Geography and geographical education: some speculations for the twenty-first century. Geography 80: 3-13.

What’s in a launch? BERA’s manifesto for EfS

Despite living in New Zealand, I set my early alarm and set my zoom for the launch of BERA’s Manifesto for Education for Sustainability with a feeling of anticipation. The launch was a big moment, timed to coincide with COP26 in Glasgow. Here, maybe, at last, is a breakthrough: education taking seriously the climate emergency and environmental crisis.

I came away a little confused. Maybe I expected too much from a ‘manifesto’. The launch was slick enough. There were upbeat messages. Much was made of the consultation and involvement of young people. There were clear actions, brightly stated in single words. A young climate activist explained why this was a moment of great important, the founder of the Black Environmental Network reminded us not to separate sustainability from wider issues of diversity and inclusion. The representative from the Royal Society of Chemistry spoke a lot about preparing people for ‘green jobs’ of the future. And a representative from the House of Lords spoke about the need to empower teachers to feel confident to take hold of the issues. A cross section (sort of) of society united in the positive messages about shared values, the competences needed, and the need to be brave and keep going on the issue, in classrooms, schools, communities and government.

Perhaps the slickness and the positivity prevented any of the grit of sustainability as a concept spoiling the look. It is notable that the manifesto did not attempt to define the term – perhaps we all already agree what sustainability would look like. Maybe an attempt to define it would open space for critique and disagreement. Anyway, there was an ‘elephant in the room’: why has it taken until 2021 for this manifesto to appear?

The launch was upbeat and positive. But eventually, politics will slip in at the back door, this is because there are ‘sustainability winners’ and ‘sustainability losers’. As Hugh Stretton wrote many years’ ago:

“People can’t change the way they use resources without changing their relations with one another. For example there are dozens of ways to economize energy: some would stop the rich wasting it, others would freeze the poor to death”.

In the end, there has be some politics, and, when I downloaded the manifesto, complete with beautiful and colourful illustrations, I couldn’t avoid the feeling that sustainability was being aestheticized once again, a popular ‘environmental ethos’ that makes us feel warm and fuzzy and deflects from the hard choices on the road ahead.

But then again, it was early morning in New Zealand and perhaps I was being grumpy. The hope is that the Manifesto is a spur to argument, clarification and action.

One Review to rule them all? Ofsted’s Review of Research in Geography

One feature of the recent history of school geography in England is the periodic publication of ‘official’ views of the state of the subject. One thinks, for example, New thinking in school Geography, published in 1972 which endorsed the approach and methods of the so-called ‘new geography’, or Geography from 5 to 16, published in the mid-1980s which, in retrospect, was an attempt to shore up the social democratic curriculum in the midst of widespread social and cultural change. It was soon to be superseded by the National Curriculum, an attempt (which is now three decades in the making) to align educational practices with the broad aims of the state. It was in this context that Ofsted was created and the idea that it was possible to define ‘best practice’ on the basis of ‘evidence’ gained credence.

The publication of Ofsted’s Review of the Research evidence around Geography in schools, and written by an HMI, is thus a significant event. Clearly designed to be authoritative and claiming to effectively survey the landscape, the review seeks to convince its readers (geography teachers and school leaders) that its representation of the state of the subject in schools is believable and reasonable. It seeks to establish aspects of ‘best practice’ – what Ofsted is looking for – and convince us that this is based on reliable ‘evidence’.

Of course, there is much to learn from the review, with its 220 footnotes referencing research studies, the coverage of the subject across a range of sectors, and the focus on aspects of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. Many individual researchers will be pleased to see their work cited in an ‘official’ document, and the Geographical Association – the organisation that represents geography teachers – was quick to welcome the review’s acknowledgement that ‘high quality’ geography teaching requires continued professional development and support.

However, some commentators have already noted the omissions of the review, and this short piece attempts to place these in relation to its impoverished understanding of ‘curriculum’. The review is the latest manifestation of the tendency to ensure school geography not only remains insulated from the wider discipline but also from social, economic, political and environmental contexts in which it operates.

Curriculum Matters

Whatever other functions and purposes the school serves, ‘what it sets out to teach lies at the heart of its existence’[i]. This is very much in my own mind as I prepare to take up an academic post at the Institute of Education which, over the years, has been an important place for the study and advancement of geography education, with figures such as Norman Graves, Frances Slater, and, most recently, David Lambert. The common thread in their work is that they insist that the ‘curriculum question’ – stated by Graves as  “finding suitable objectives, arranging appropriate learning experiences for the students and finding ways of evaluating these learning experiences” –  at the centre of any meaningful discussion of geography education.

But curriculum is a hotly contested concept. This is because the curriculum is “no less than the knowledge system of a society, and therefore not only an ontology, but also the metaphysics and ideology that society has agreed to recognize as legitimate and truthful; it sets the canons of truthfulness”. Whilst for some subjects, it might just be possible to see knowledge as relatively unchanging, this is not the case for a subject like Geography, which is always facing the challenge of how to survey and represent the contours of a rapidly changing world.

Whilst the Review recognises the fact that Geography is a dynamic subject, and that there are different views about the nature of disciplinary knowledge, it does not explore this in any real detail. In fact, the question of what is geography is too quickly resolved. This may be because the Review’s author(s) want to avoid the all-too-familiar refrain that ‘Geography is what geographers do’.  However much we might sympathize with that sentiment, it must be admitted that this is where much of the intellectual energy that has driven our discipline (and continues to drive it) comes from – think of the various ‘turns’ that drive geographers to ask new questions, and expand the reach of the subject.

The review is woefully thin on this, relying on no less than Barack Obama and the Higher Education Authority to tell is what geography is. It is puzzling that Ofsted do not allow geographers to speak for themselves. There are plenty of short, accessible books that offer answers to this: for instance What is Geography? (Bonnett, 2008), Geography: a very short introduction (Herbert and Matthews, 2008) ), Why Geography matters (Crane, 2018), Geography (Dorling and Lee, 2016), and Geography: why it matters (Murphy, 2018) all explore the question of why geography matters, and it is the subtle differences in emphasis of each that keeps the conversation going. Reading them (and of course others) gives a strong sense of a subject that is working out how to ‘know’ the world. Of course, the authors of these books are all-male, all-white, which itself prompts questions about the subject’s long tradition of including some perspectives and excluding others.

This is not simply an academic exercise: what it offers is the sense of a discipline that is constantly grappling with how to make sense of, how to devise cognitive maps, of a changing world, a world in the making. This is why the question of curriculum can never be finally resolved. It is always under discussion, up for renewal.  But because the Review takes so little interest in the contest of ideas as they apply to geography, it is able to present the current version of the National Curriculum as a done deal, a neutral and common-sense statement, rather than as a cultural-historical (and thus, political) construction.

The result is to fix the subject in a technocratic framework and sidestep the politics of the curriculum. This is what scholarship (as opposed to research) in geography education (which has increasingly engaged with arguments in curriculum studies) is able to offer, but the curriculum is seen as an ‘object’ rather than as a ‘problem’, all that is left is to explain how best to organize it, plan for progression, and teach it – hence the overwhelming focus of the Review on pedagogy and assessment. It is telling that the discussion of ‘Disciplinary knowledge’ is brief and over-simplified. The review talks about a ‘powerful knowledge’ approach, but this is lifted out of its context as an attempt to mobilize aspects of a complex debate in the sociology of education (running from the mid-1960s to the present) which was all about the production and distribution of knowledge – whose knowledge is it? Who selected it? Why is it organized and taught in this way?

The politics of the Review

It is striking that this Review was written and published at a moment of extraordinary ‘spatial flux’. The global financial crash and the subsequent decade of austerity has begun to redraw the economic and social order, the impacts on political geography are plain to see, and there is growing sense of social division, as evidenced through the rise of Black Lives Matters, the #MeToo movement. There is growing sense of generation divide that is increasingly expressed through the politics of climate change. All this before the shock of Covid-19 and how it might impact economy and culture are acknowledged. These are issues and themes which geographers are at the forefront of studying. They challenge – or at least they should challenge – our sense of the curriculum, of what schools are for.

But on these issues, the Review is silent. It is as if geography teaching in schools operates in a parallel universe.

This should not come as a surprise. The official ‘reports’ on school geography mentioned at the beginning of this piece reflected concerns at the time. New Thinking in School Geography offered state-endorsement of the new geography on the grounds that curriculum modernization was required to meet the needs of new society. Its opening lines are: “Geography teachers find themselves in an unstable period of rapid change”. If geography is to make a contribution it to society it must attend to real world problems. Geography from 5-16 stressed the social and political aspects of geographical issues and the need to attend to values and beliefs in a multicultural society. The fact that the Review avoids reference to a rapidly changing landscape is significant. It is effectively a call for Geography teachers to “Keep calm and teach Grid References’. As such it reflects the current needs of the educational state, which may be summarised as securing the conditions for resumed rounds of economic growth at the same time as ensuring social cohesion (compliant and qualified school leavers who broadly accept a vision of life in a neoliberal culture – hence the Review’s comment about Geography as a subject that promotes effective citizenship).

Geography teachers – the majority of whom work in state schools – will have a variety of reactions to the Review. We should not underestimate the power of Ofsted to ‘hail’ geography teachers and remind them that they are paid servants of the state. At the same time, and despite the cord between the economy and education being pulled ever tighter, there is still room for autonomy. Indeed, to reference a deeply unfashionable source, it is material reality that shapes our ideas about the world, and the economic, social and planetary crisis that is underway is something that will continue to push its way into the lived experiences of geography teachers at all levels. Importantly, the warrant for teaching about ‘actually existing geographies’ rather than ‘Ofsted’s Geography’  comes from the discipline of Geography itself, which, at its best and at times of social change, has provided us with maps of meaning with which to make sense of a changing world.

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[i] Golby, M. (1989) Curriculum traditions. In. B.Moon, P. Murphy, and J. Rayner (eds.) Policies for the curriculum. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

Black Lives Matter and Geography Teaching

 

The video footage showing three white police officers forcibly restraining George Floyd leading to his death prompted a range of protests and demonstrations across the world. In Britain it led to the demolition of the statue of Edward Colston, a prominent philanthropist in the city of Bristol whose wealth was directly linked to the profits derived from slavery. The statue of Cecil Rhodes in Oxford has also now been removed, and there has been heightened awareness of the extent of racial inequality at all levels of society.

Countless commentators correctly assert that ‘education’ is clearly part of how society responds to these events and issue, so it is notable that the Geographical Association recently published a statement in support of the Black Lives Matter[1] campaign, and how geography teaching can be part of improving ‘inclusion’ as part of its detailed and wide ranging  ‘equal opportunities’ policy[2].

These moves are to be welcomed. They feel significant. They provide an opportunity to reflect on exactly how geography teaching can contribute to an understanding of the issues involved.

 

Geography education and ‘race’ in context

The first thing to say is that the Geographical Association’s vision of geography as a school subject should be seen in relation to a wider narrative about the development of a multicultural and culturally diverse society. In line with the current mood, the GA’s statement points to the role that geography played in shaping a racist geographical imagination from the earliest part of its history as an ever present component of the school curriculum. For example, many geography textbooks reflected a racial classification of people and a view of the world based on climatic determinism. Although the story is more complicated than it seems, not least because in the interwar period geography was seen as a vehicle for fostering international understanding and cooperation (Porter, 2004), it was almost certainly the case that an Anglo-centric viewpoint was adopted. Daniel Dorling and Sally Tomlinson (2019) note that the school curriculum failed to teach children growing up in the decades after World War Two about the process of decolonization. Not only has this resulted in widespread ignorance as to why people from across the world (and especially from Britain’s former colonies) had the right to come and live and work in Britain but there was a profound lack of preparedness to think about Britain’s evolving place in the contemporary world. They write, “(t)here was no explanation for the presence of black people, and the overt and covert racism and crude beliefs which were a legacy of empire continued in schools …” (p 00).

The fact is that, in the post-war period, immigration from what was designated the New Commonwealth and Pakistan (NCWP) resulted in an increasingly multicultural school population. The dominant model for education was that of assimilation, which assumed that the children of African, West Indian and Asian migrants should be helped to adapt to the cultures and habits of the ‘host’ society. Some voices were heard even then pointing to the way in which such ‘multiracial education’ was based on white liberal anxiety about racialised minorities and a tendency to pathologise black children (Stone 1981).

By 1977[3] an educational Green Paper (HMSO, 1977) explicitly recognised the need to teach for a multicultural society. Race relations, as it was called, took a turn for the worst in the early 1980s when, at a time of deindustrialisation and high youth unemployment, a series of urban disturbances took place on the streets of large British cities such as Bristol, London, Manchester, Liverpool, and later Birmingham. The ‘inner-city problem’ (as studied by geographers) had an important racial dimension and in large urban educational authorities where ‘immigrant’ settlement was more dense, developing an improved educational response became a priority. Two main approaches developed. First, there was ‘multicultural education’, which pointed to the importance of recognising the existence of a plurality of cultures and finding ways to makes sure these were represented in the school curriculum and classroom. Virtually from the start, the criticism of this approach was that it led to a superficial view of what was often termed ‘saris, samosas, and steel-bands’. The other, more ‘radical’ approach was ‘anti-racist education’, which stressed the importance of power and economic structure in creating racism. In its famous formulation, Racism = Prejudice + Power, anti-racist education attempted to acknowledge the roots of racism, which appeared to threaten the status quo and to some therefore was deemed ‘political’ (and so inappropriate for the classroom).  There was a third option, of course, adopted in many schools where there were no or few students from ethnic minorities, which was to declare that there is ‘no problem here’ and avoid discussion of the issue altogether.

Geography teachers got involved in these debates in the early 1980s, notably through the ‘GYSL[4] affair’. At the centre of this was Dawn Gill (a geography teacher at Quintin Kynaston School in Westminster), whom the Schools Council had commissioned to write a report  on ‘how syllabuses and examinations could meet the needs of all pupils in a multicultural society’. In her report Gill eschewed this definition and argued that examination courses which ensure better grades for non-whites will not necessarily have any effect on discrimination in employment; and that racism, not formal educational qualifications, was the main determinant of life chances for black students in the UK.

The Schools Council declined to publish the report, which caused outrage and a flurry of correspondence in pages of the Guardian newspaper. In the aftermath, the Association for Curriculum Development was formed, along with a new (and as it turns out, short-lived) journal – Contemporary Issues in Geography and Education – which took many of its insights from the ‘radical geography’ that was emerging at the time. A conference was held – entitled ‘Racist Society: Racist Geography’ – the proceedings of which featured a cartoon of a school building in which the geography teacher is introducing children to the topic of plantation agriculture, whilst outside there were demonstrators from the National Front protesting about immigrants taking British people’s jobs. The point, fairly obviously, was that school geography was unable even to see its contribution to the racist imaginary let alone deal with the reality of a diverse society that was becoming increasingly divided.

The juicy GYSL affair prompted the formation of a working group of the Geographical Association led by Rex Walford which published a document called Geographical Education for a Multicultural Society in 1985 (Walford, 1985). As might be expected, the document was measured and ‘fair-minded’ and attempted to look forward and assert the potential of the school subject to shape minds (for a multicultural society, not in) . However, looking back it was set within a framework of common sense liberalism and largely silent about the structural basis of racism in education and society. There was little sense in which the structural perspectives (based around conflict theory) that were increasingly animating and informing the work of geographers in the field (see Jackson and Smith 1984, for example) were recognised or drawn upon. Looking back, this was perhaps a missed opportunity.

At the turn of the century we attempted to update and summarise the state of the debate in an article in Geography (Morgan and Lambert, 2001). We were strongly influenced the argument that ‘race’ is not a given fact but a social construct, and that part of the challenge for geography educators was to help students to read the hidden text of places and spaces for the racial code. In addition, we drew upon the work of geographers such as Peter Jackson (1989) and Alistair Bonnett (2000) to stress that we should acknowledge and examine whiteness as an ethnic category. All this was underpinned by important if fractured academic debates taking place  at the time – also within antiracism education –  around the multiple construction of identity and ethnicities. The corollary of such socio-cultural perspectives was the argument that a rationalist approach to antiracist education, which assumed that presenting students with ‘facts’ and a rational argument would necessarily lead to change in attitude or belief, were at best hopeful and naïve – and at worst simply inept. We proposed in the article a challenging ‘deconstructive’ approach to pedagogy, but admitted that our article could be “read by some as another in a long line of discussions which leave the reader with no answer … it is one thing to argue for ‘new pedagogies’ but what do they look like? What things have been tried and what is being done now?” (Morgan and Lambert 2001, p245).  It is for this reason we went on to at least try draw out the pedagogical implications of our arguments in a book published in the Geographical Association’s Theory into Practice series (Morgan and Lambert 2003).

The events outlined above point to the fact that the Geographical Association has made attempted to grasp and address issues of ethnic disadvantage and racism in geography education. This should be acknowledged but at the same time it needs to be accepted that the wider community of geography educators has found it difficult to respond fully to this lead. These are after all truly difficult matters that require us to think not only about injustice and bias in an abstract professional sense, but accept the truth that black writers such as James Baldwin (for one) asked the dominant culture to understand: that “the power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man (sic) refuses to accept the white world’s definitions”. Baldwin was writing several decades ago, but his bald statement explains to a large extent why the Runnymede Trust’s recently published report Race and Racism in English Secondary Schools (Joseph-Salisbury, 2020) candidly observes that even now “the National Curriculum does not mandate for engagement with colonial legacies – or the racist underpinnings – of contemporary Britain” (p2).

So looking back, we can detect a degree of optimism in our earlier discussions of race and geography. Ours was part of the wider ‘postmodern’ challenge in geography, where it seemed to be that to critique (and perhaps hint at alternative design) was enough. Part of the Runneymede Trust’s recommendations are to increase the “racial literacy of teachers” – to fully grasp how race and racisms work in society. For without this the way teachers interpret and enact the curriculum will be limited: after all, ‘colonial legacies’ can be taught as a triumphalist moment of white supremacy. It really matters whose definitions we take and in what ways we interrogate the content of what is taught.

 

Geography education and Black Lives Matter

 

A key lesson, of course, is that racism does not stand still (Sivanandan, 2008). When one of us was recently preparing to write a chapter on race and education (Morgan, 2019: Ch 5) it was clear that the landscape had changed. The spur for the chapter was David Gillborn’s (2010) argument that educational policy itself was an act of white supremacy, a ‘political, economic  and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and resources’. At the time this seemed too sweeping a statement. It seemed to smooth over the twists and turns of race and ethnicity over the past 50 years. In the end, the chapter emphasised the process whereby, within a generation or two, West Indian immigrants had become Black Britons, and the growing presence of South Asian culture was seen as part of the increasing diverse multi-ethnic Britain. However, along the way, the chapter also showed how, despite making significant gains, both multicultural education and antiracist education may have run into the sand. It concluded, following the words of Stuart Hall (whose 1980 article, written for teachers, remains essential reading; Hall, 1980) that: “(I)n these times, one of the most important things that schools and teachers can offer their students is some understanding of the arguments and debates that attend to what it means to belong to a national culture.” (p91). Part of this is most definitely to ‘teach race’ but recognise that although race exists as a  category it cannot be disentangled from other issues, especially class. Thus, the curriculum should attend to both the historical formation and changing geographical patterns of British capitalism. In concrete terms, this would encourage us not to eschew geographical topics such as “UK manufacturing industry”, for example (on the grounds of ‘relevance’ – manufacturing accounted for less than 18% of the UK workforce in 2019). On the contrary, we can incorporate our racial literacy into reworking such topics. For example: How would we teach the topic after reading Sven Beckert’s (2015) Empire of Cotton?

One of the things we are suggesting here is not to condemn the curriculum as Gillborn urges. His position is that the school curriculum is organised around the ‘knowledge of the powerful’: that it is exclusive and it lies. Of course, there is a need to be attentive to this viewpoint. But we find it bleak and literally useless: what are teachers to do with this? What we choose to teach and how we do this are key.  Our assessment is that the geography curriculum, even as it currently stands, offers possibilities and opportunities to provide students with ‘powerful knowledge’ about how the UK space (always part of a global space and not an island ‘set in a silver sea’) has come to take the form that it currently takes, in ways that does not hide or silence complex questions of race. This is how we can make Black Lives Matter mean something enduring and real in geography teaching.

References

Beckert, S. (2015) Empire of Cotton: a new history of global capitalism. London: Penguin Books

Bonnett, A. (2000) Anti-racism. London: Routledge.

Dorling, D. and Tomlinson, S. (2019) Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire. Hull, UK: Biteback Publishing.

Fairgrieve, J. (1926) Geography in School. London: University of London Press.

Gillborn, D. (2010) Racism and Education: coincidence or conspiracy? London: Routledge.

Hall, S. (1981). ‘Teaching race’. In A. James and R. Jeffcoate (Eds.) The School in The Multicultural Society. London: Harper and Row.

HMSO (1977) Education in Schools: a consultative document. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/des1977/educinschools.html

Jackson, P. (1989) Maps of Meaning. London: London: Routledge.

Jackson, P. and Smith, S. (1984) Exploring Social Geography. Allen and Unwin.

Joseph-Salisbury, R. (2020) Runnymede Perspectives: Race and Racism in English Secondary Schools. London The Runneymede Trust. https://www.runnymedetrust.org/uploads/publications/pdfs/Runnymede%20Secondary%20Schools%20report%20FINAL.pdf

Morgan, J. (2019) Culture and the Political Economy of Schooling: what’s left for education? Abingdon: Routledge.

Morgan, J. and Lambert, D. (2001) Geography, ‘Race’ and Education. Geography, 86, 3, 235-246.

Morgan, J. and Lambert, D. (2003) Place, ‘Race’ and Teaching Geography. Sheffield: Geographical Association.

Porter, B. (2004) The Absent-Minded Imperialists. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sivanandan, A. (2008) Catching History on the Wing: race, culture and globalisation. London: Pluto Press.

Stone, M. (1981) The Education of the Black Child in Britain. Fontana Paperback.

Walford, R. (Ed) (1985) Geographical Education for a Multicultural Society. Sheffield: Geographical Association.

[1] https://www.geography.org.uk/Announcements-and-updates/black-lives-matter

[2]https://www.geography.org.uk/write/MediaUploads/About%20us/EQUAL_OPPORTUNITIES_and_INCLUSION_POLICY.MAR_2020.doc

 

[3] Following the so-called ‘Great Debate’ on educational provision launched by Prime Minister James Callaghan in the mid-1970s  this discussion document makes observations still worth pondering today. For example, “Ours is now a multiracial and multicultural country, and one in which traditional social patterns are breaking down” (para 1.10) and “the education appropriate to our Imperial past cannot meet the requirements of modern Britain.” (para 1.11)

[4] Geography for the Young School Leaver (GYSL) was a highly successful Schools Council curriculum project designed to modernise school geography. See a recent retrospective on this in the pages of the GA’s journal, Geography (Higginbottom, 2018)

Recent Changes to the School Geography Curriculum: Policy, Processes and Subject Knowledge’

At the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference held at Exeter University in September 2015, members of GEReCo made a major contribution to a session on ‘The Impacts of Recent Changes to the School Geography Curriculum: Policy, Processes and Subject Knowledge’.

Convened by Eleanor Rawling, this session was sponsored by the Higher Education Research Group (HERG) of the RGS-IBG, and chaired by Jennifer Hill of HERG. It comprised of presentations on ‘School Geography: Policy, Processes and Curriculum Change’ (Eleanor Rawling); ‘What’s Going On?: Teachers’ Responses to Curriculum Change’ (Mary Biddulph); ‘Reconsidering Geography at the Schools-HE boundary – the ALCAB experience’ (Martin Evans) and ‘What Impact will changes in Teacher Education have on the Geography Curriculum in schools?’ (Graham Butt). It was well attended, despite competing in the programme with several other academic and research inputs.
GEReCo is extremely grateful to Martin, an academic geographer based at the University of Manchester and ex-Chair of the ALCAB Geography Panel, for his contribution to the session (and as a non GEReCo member!). Each presentation was followed by lively discussion focussed on the place of geography subject knowledge in schools, teacher education and higher education.

A particular theme emerging from the session was the need for professional engagement and debate about the future of the subject in schools, with particular reference to further contributions from academia. The opportunities for inputs into political debates about geography in schools, and indeed about curriculum development in geography at all levels, was also aired.

Off the Map?

Geographers often claim that ‘Places matter’. This sounds obvious enough, but what that actually means is less clear. In the 1970s geographers began to write about the rise of ‘placelessness’, and this concern that places were losing their distinctiveness heightened in the 1990s with the intensification of globalizing processes. Suddenly there was talk of ‘non-places’, ‘clone towns’ and ‘the geography of nowhere’ It is this that animates Alistair Bonnett’s new book Off the Map. He describes the feeling created from his journey from Epping (where he grew up) on the Central Line or on London’s Orbital road:
“I often felt as though I was travelling from nowhere to nowhere. Moving through landscapes that once meant an awful lot, but have been reduced to spaces of transit where everything is temporary and everyone is just passing through gave me a sense of unease and a hunger for places that matter”.
The book consists of 47 short essays about particular places – from ‘Traffic Islands’ to islands that were marked on maps but never actually existed, from the new desert created after the shrinking of the Aral Sea to cities which have changed their names and identities through political revolution. The effect is strange. Bonnett’s point is that to be human is to want to be involved in meaningful acts of place-making, but this is not an easy process. The forces that create placelessness are ever more powerful, and indeed many of the places Bonnett ‘visited’ via Google Earth! But even that is a serious point, since geographical imaginations are being shaped by a variety of media and everyday activities.
Off the Map, with its subtitle: ‘Lost spaces, invisible cities, forgotten islands, feral places (and what they tell us about the world)’ makes for an interesting read for geographers. It is the product of a fertile geographical imagination. Bonnett is a Professor of Social Geography at Newcastle University (UK) and has, since the early 1990s produced a series of books and articles that offer an idiosyncratic take on how ideas shape the world. I first encountered Bonnett at a teachers’ conference on Anti-racist education in Luton in the mid-1990s. I remember it well because Bonnett spoke about his research on whiteness as an ethnicity. The idea that whiteness could be the basis for an ethnic identity caused some puzzlement. This was before the growing interest among geographers about the geographies of whiteness. After that, I kept an eye out for his work, and next encountered it through a little known journal called ‘Transgressions: a journal of urban exploration’ which was a forerunner of the psychogeographical literature that became so fashionable in the late 1990s and 2000s. This involved seeing and experiencing places in non-standard ways, such as exploring one city using a map of another one! His next book was The idea of the West, and drew upon the notion of the ‘myth of continents’. That is, the regions such as continents that we assume are geographical entities are best seen as geopolitical constructions. Bonnett explored the changing defintions, represresentations and political constructions of the ‘west’. Next was his book What is Geography? Published in 2008 and which was his attempt to write a popular geographical text. It is an interesting book for teachers to read, not least because it sets out to argue that geography should be seen as a product of modernity, and that there exist both academic and popular geographical imaginations. In many ways, the institutions associated with geography are codifications of the popular geographical imagination. Bonnett makes it clear that no-one ‘owns’ geography, and at one point argues that attempts by geographers to claim ‘space’ as their own is a little bit rich. Who is to say that academic geographers, closeted in their Ivory Tower and drawn from a wealthy (thus narrow) social milieu, can claim to know places any better than ‘ordinary’ people. Left in the Past: radicalism and the politics of nostalgia, is a study of the way in which a yearning for the ‘world we have lost’ informs the political imaginations of even the most radical individuals who seek to sweep away the past and change the world – the ‘patricians of forgetting’. Interestingly, it is places and landscapes that produce this nostalgia, as in the work of ‘psychogeographers’ such as Ian Sinclair and his wanderings around the forgotten spaces of London. It is this sense of loss of place that is the springboard for Bonnett’s latest book, which seems to bring together a number of the threads in Bonnett’s recent work. It’s written for a popular audience, and makes the point that we all have an investment in places and landscapes. In addition, it recognises the nostalgia that the contemporary world can induce in us all.

Presiding over chaos

There is a famous apocryphal moment when the Soviet delegation, visiting New York City, asked in wonder and amazement, who it was that was able to organize the bread supply chain so brilliantly: everyday, without exception, fresh bread is delivered in extraordinary varieties to thousands of individual shops, cafes and supermarkets!  Who manages that? The answer, of course, was no one. It is the invisible hand of the market at work.

 So powerful is this idea these days it has dulled our ability to think. And it enables the UK Secretary of State to get away with murder. That is not an overstatement: the government is presiding over the murder of a national education system. Unless we think that providing education is nothing more complicated than supplying bread (and that is complicated enough!) then we do need a system, not just a free for all ‘market’. Why? Because education is very expensive (it cannot afford lots of waste, unlike the food industry); it is a form of sustained, social engagement not a form of individualized consumption (you cannot chop and change your education supplier on whim, or on a daily basis); and it is one of the best means we know to develop human potential – and we know that this takes community effort and collective will (it is of no great consequence if a bread shop is goes out of business – that is the game – but if schools are undermined, weakened or are closed it has dramatic effects).

 Even as I write this I can predict the rude and dismissive counter charge from some quarters that I am simply part of the problem – a kind of neo-Marxist, statist, ‘reactionary’ who needs to be stopped, put down, circumvented or simply ignored. But I am none of those things. Indeed, I am on record as cautiously welcoming the ‘knowledge turn’ that followed Mr Gove’s appointment as Secretary of State. I am intrigued by the possible long-term impact that may result from the government’s enthusiastic endorsement of Teach First. I am utterly sold on partnership training of teachers so that the majority of their training in conducted in schools (as has now been the case for twenty years). I am even in favour of ‘academies’, because ‘comprehensive schooling’ is a brand so damaged after sustained attack from successive governments that it cannot be retrieved.

 My issue is that you can introduce all the above, and reform the national curriculum, and restore rigour to the examination system (again, I am in favour) without dismantling the system. For that you need a kind of blind ideology: just look what is actually happening.

 The national curriculum, which we are told will restore knowledge and rigour in schools, does not have to be taught by free schools and academies (that is, by now most secondary schools in England). The inconsistency here is breathtaking. Can we conclude that Mr Gove, having introduced a radical curriculum review, is actually not interested in the curriculum? Probably not, although we might ask why should he be? He is after all only the Minister. The Minister does not need experience or specialist knowledge of curriculum matters – he should leave that to the professionals. But we know full well that he does indeed lay down what he thinks should be taught in schools – particularly in some subjects like English and history. He is extremely hands on. So why, in effect, undermine his own national curriculum? We are told that, in effect, it is because teachers need the ‘freedoms’ enjoyed by New York bread shops. This ideological position is contributing to the destruction of a national education system.

 There is a view, which I also have some sympathy for, which goes something like this. ‘Curriculum’ is one of the central ideas in education. As such, it should be owned by educationists – which means the teaching profession supported by academics, scholars and researchers whose job it is to continually critique and redesign such key ideas, so that what happens in practice remains fit for a changing world. It is, definitely, not for politicians to get too close to this (just as they should stay away from the detail in law, medicine, engineering and other parts of the social, economic and cultural infrastructure). I suspect Mr Gove would agree with this.

 But why then abolish, in the so-called ‘bonfire of the quangos’, the various agencies that were set up to handle the detail of the curriculum, at arm’s length from government? One of the first acts of this government was to dismantle the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority – so that for the first time in over 40 years England had no independent agency of experts overseeing the curriculum. None.  Thus, matters of teacher training, curriculum design and so on are conducted by civil servants inside the ministry.

 Why attack universities and teacher training establishments, so that research and scholarly endeavour in the field of education is undermined, ridiculed even? It’s not just about deregulation and ‘freedoms’, for ironically education policy making is now possibly closer to a Soviet model than it is to Singapore or Finland, those ‘jurisdictions’ whose PISA results we are so encouraged to emulate.

 What it has achieved is the destruction of the education system. Collective effort – and responsibility – is undermined and weakened. All markets have winners and losers, and as the market is given freer rein Headteachers are hired and fired like football managers, expected to ‘turn thing round’ in weeks or months if the results have been poor. The infrastructure of local democratic governance, university departments of education, curriculum quangos and so forth was established collectively to moderate its worst effects of teaching to the test. But we are going right back there. With no national system, warm words about social justice emerging though the market is just nonsense.

 Ok. What’s this got to do with geography education? That will be in my next post.

What is the ‘knowledge turn’ and why does it matter?

Over the past couple of years geography educators in the UK have become increasingly interested in some developments around the ‘sociology of knowledge’. In particular, they have taken up some of the recent writing of Michael Young, Emeritus Professor at the Institute of Education (London) and especially his 2008 book Bringing Knowledge Back In. Others have engaged with Young’s work, so my purpose here is to place the recent ‘knowledge turn’ in a slightly broader context, and raise some of my own concerns about this development.

A significant aspect of the move to ‘bring knowledge back in’ is that it represents an ‘about turn’ on the part of sociologists of education who were part of the influential ‘new sociology of education’ in the early 1970s. At that time, writers such as Michael Young were influential in popularizing the idea among teachers that the knowledge found in school subjects was ‘socially constructed’ and, crucially, the selections of knowledge that comprise such subjects reflected the interests of powerful groups in society. The implications of this are profound, since it suggests that (a) the poor performance of particular social groups can be accounted for by the fact that ‘their’ knowledge doesn’t find representation in the curriculum, and, (b) school knowledge can be constructed otherwise.

Given the context of a society that was becoming increasingly ‘de-traditionalised’ and a teaching that was made up of the socially progressive middle classes, it is understandable that these ideas gained interest and widespread acceptance. Indeed, by the time I came to teach geography in London schools in 1988 it was not ‘radical’ to argue that ‘traditional’ school geography was a conservative representation of the geographical world-views of white, middle-class, men and that, accordingly, there was a need to recognise and make visible ‘other’ geographies. As the books on my shelves from the 1990s remind me, the ‘postmodern’ and ‘cultural turns’ that geography experienced reflect the wide range of ‘local’ geographies that exist (e.g Places on the Body, Body Spaces, Mapping Desire, The globalization of sexuality, Mapping Men, The geographies of disability, Animal Geographies, Mind and Body Spaces, The geography of children and young people, Spaces of Hate etc.) 

It is this shift from “Geography’ to ‘geographies’ has led to moves to ‘Bring Knowledge Back In’. For Michael Young and colleagues  the celebration of ‘local’ knowledges, the relativism that is implied by this, and the refusal to accept the notion of accepted ‘Truth’ amounts to the rejection and loss of faith in the established and accepted ‘Truth’  – or powerful knowledge – that is offered by academic disciplines. The knowledge found within subjects may be socially constructed, but it has a durability, stability, and existence independent of any social interest; it is social realist.

This ‘social realist’ stance is particularly valuable for geography educators who, over the past decade or so, have been struggling to ensure that discussions of curriculum (the what of teaching) are not lost in the drive to ‘improve learning’ through pedagogical innovations. The difficulty though, as far as I can see, is that discussion of the ‘knowledge turn’ in school subjects very quickly leads to a retrogressive ‘return to tradition’ or what Stephen Ball a long time ago described as the ‘curriculum of the dead’. I write as someone who, in the 199os wrote a thesis called ‘Postmodernism and Geography Education’, which, as I re-read it, celebrated the de-stabilising of school geography and the potential for celebrating previously marginalised and ignored ways in which people construct and re-make space. This is an important gain. However, there is a danger of seeing all this flux and flow as inherently liberating (‘cool places’, as some geographers would have it) whereas a harder, more material geography is where power and control lie, and it is these ‘real’ social processes that are so often missing from geography lessons.

This reminds me of what was so exciting about discovering the key geographical texts of the 1980s (The Limits to Capital, Spatial Divisions of Labour, Arenas of Capital, Uneven Development); they offered a version of geographical knowledge which was powerful because it allowed us to explain the world in new ways. Though as a discipline geography has become increasingly ‘post-structural’, there are important challenges for geography educators in taking the notion of ‘social realism’ (at present little more an interesting angle to take in dinner party conversations) and turning it into a robust and defensible basis for curriculum-making.

Is everyone a geographer?

(David Lambert writes)

Joseph Kerski asked recently: “Isn’t everyone a geographer? And, what about the increasing number of professionals outside who are incorporating spatial thinking and GIS into their work—in business, history, mathematics, design, biology, engineering and other fields. Are they geographers? Do they need to be geographers?”

As Joseph knows, this got my goat a bit! But I think we can use this as a launch pad to debate geographical knowledge and the school curriculum. Have your say.

Why did it rile me? Well mainly because it seems to undermine geography school.

We could say everyone (almost) is an author (we can write shopping lists or stories), a scientist (we can make systematic observations and make inferences), an athlete (we can run for the bus and play football), an historian (we have a past, a family story, an historical setting) …

My problem is I just do not see why this matters or how it is in any way a significant thing to say – at least to an educationist. I also think it endangers what we might feel is of value about a discipline, what Michael Young calls powerful knowledge which, I think by definition, is not available in the everyday.

What is there to be gained by saying everyone is a geographer? There is certainly a lot to be lost if you think, like me, we should educate young people with geography. If being a geographer is that easy why spending enormous amounts of public money sending children to school to learn geography? (Or are we also de-schoolers too?)

As for saying everyone is a geographer but doesn’t realise it, (as others have suggested), this seems to me even more tricky! I can see the idea of education as being there to initiate people into ways of seeing etc, but I have difficulty in the idea of (merely) ‘unfolding the enfolded’ (that is borrowed from Roy Bhaskar) – as if all knowledge is somehow already there, just waiting to be released.

I don’t think there is much to be gained by saying being a geographer is just a part of being human – not in an educational setting anyhow. I find it undermines us as teachers.

Eleanor Rawling emailed me to say: “The whole point of education is to develop and expand our everyday knowledge, introducing us to the powerful ideas and ways of thinking that help us to move beyond the everyday and to have a deeper understanding of where everyday experiences fit into a wider context. This access to powerful and deep knowledge is the whole point of education and appearing to deny that it is necessary does us no favours. Children’s/students everyday understandings can be a starting point or hook for the educational journey but education is not just an exercise in ‘recognising this’ – that’s a pretty low level expectation. We, as geography (or history or any subject) educators have a far more significant responsibility”.

So, in what ways is geography powerful knowledge?

Gereco and the future of impolite geography

Vistors to impolitegeography in recent months will have noticed a quiet spell. This has been caused by several distractions – not least John Morgan emigrating to New Zealand this year. David Lambert is also stepping down from the GA. During these changes we have decided to broaden the base of impolite geography. It is now ‘hosted’ by Gereco – see the link to the right.

But we have not turned this into a committee blog! Individual members of gereco will occasionally write their own provocations. The ethos is the same: to record thoughtful short pieces on geographical perspectives. We do so in an educational context. That is, education in its broadest sense – and we are reminded of Alastair Bonnett’s recent point in Geography (vol 97, No 1, p 41) that geography, the ancient world subject, has always, ultimately, been about human survival.