A capabilities approach to higher education: geocapabilities and implications for geography curricula

Abstract

A geographical education offers more than skills, subject knowledge and generic attributes. It also develops a set of discipline-specific capabilities that contribute to a graduate’s future learning and experience, granting them special ways of thinking for lifelong development and for contributing to the welfare of themselves, their community and their world. This paper considers the broader purposes and values of disciplinary teaching in contributing to individual human development. Set in the context of recent debates concerning the role of the university and the neo-liberalisation of higher education this paper explores approaches to developing the geography curriculum in ways that re-assert the educational value of geographical thinking for students. Using international examples of teaching and learning practice in geography, we recognise five geocapabilities: use of the geographical imagination; ethical subject-hood with respect to the impacts of geographical processes; integrative thinking about society–environment relationships; spatial thinking; and the structured exploration of places. A capabilities approach offers a productive and resilient response to the threats of pedagogic frailty and increasingly generic learning in higher education. Finally, a framework to stimulate dialogue about curriculum development and the role of geocapabilities in the higher education curriculum is suggested.

Keywords:

• Geocapabilities
• curriculum
• pedagogy
• human welfare development

Notes

1. For Nussbaum (2011, p. 34) “control over one’s environment” entails political and material control. Primarily this requires legal rights and the rule of law, for example having and being able to enforce the right to political participation, freedom of speech, and to own property. The term is not used in the sense that geographers traditionally approach human – environment interactions.