On the knotty question of ‘Recontextualising’ geography

Revisiting powerful knowledge

In April 2019 an impressive number of geography educationists from over 50 countries turned up in London for a two-day IGU-CGE symposium on the theme ‘recontextualising geography’. This title represented a logical next step from the same London symposium just four years earlier examining ‘the power of geographical thinking’ and from which resulted an edited book (Brooks, Butt, & Fargher, 2017). Having exerted considerable energy and scholarship on the nature of ‘powerful’ geographical knowledge and its essential contribution to the school curriculum, it seemed natural that the intellectual gaze of international geography educationists should shift more specifically on the relationship between geography as it is manifest as a school subject and the academic discipline in university departments which (presumably) nourishes it.

There are of course many books on power and geography: we can think of Richard Peet’s ‘Geography of Power’ (2007); Harm de Blij’s ‘The Power of Place’ (2009) and even Tim Marshall’s ‘Prisoners of Geography’ (2016). They are all very different but united in their curiosity about why geography matters – the significance of place, space and environment on society. Indeed political geography and the distribution of power is an enduring theme in geographical studies, from Mackinder’s geopolitics which helped establish geography as a serious academic discipline, to James Faigrieve’s classic ‘Geography and World Power’ (1915) which was profoundly influential on geography as a school subject, and Peter Taylor’s influential ‘Political Geography’ (1985) now, with Colin Flint, in its seventh edition (2018) and known to generations of undergraduates, at least in the English speaking world. However, Brooks et al. (2017) is a very different entity. It has been produced under the auspices of the IGU Commission for Education, the product of educationists who are not in this instance concerned with power of geography per se.

I should explain, for we need to untangle ‘power' and ‘geography'. It would be harsh indeed to suggest that the authors in this volume were not concerned to capture in some way the power of the geographical component of the school curriculum. For one thing, it is appealing and helpful to promote the subject in this manner, especially in jurisdictions where school geography is marginal, taken for granted or in the shadow of STEM subjects. What I am alluding to is not the geography per se, but the different meanings attached to the idea of power. And it is useful to be able to refer to recent work from Muller and Young (2019) in this respect who, a decade or so since the introduction of ‘powerful knowledge’ (PK), revisit the idea with the help of Lukes (2005). In political geography, power is a concept derived from sociology and related economic theory. It is this concept that Young and others developed in the 1970s to describe the alienating impact of the school curriculum to underprivileged children – the elite and those with the power to control the school curriculum organised it in their own interests, to deliver the ‘knowledge of the powerful’ (KOTP), usually through ‘traditional subjects’ like geography. Thus, power is taken to be something that is acquired and possessed by some and which can be exerted over others. Power is not distributed evenly, and neither are high quality knowledge-based curricula. Power can be used fairly or not, but mostly those without power are done to. In his later book, Michael Young (2008) wrote his compelling corrective to KOTP: not that the analysis on which it is based was somehow ‘wrong’, but that it failed to recognise a crucial next stage.

The missing piece of the so-called new sociology of education of the last quarter of the twentieth century (Young, 1971) was its failure then to recognise that the KOTP was in fact also powerful knowledge and that any attempt either consciously or inadvertently to deny working class youth to this (via alternative or more ‘appropriate’ curricula) was a profound injustice. These young people would rarely if ever gain access to Higher Education, the professions and other positions of power in society. True, access to powerful knowledge would offer no guarantees, but denial would be severely limiting on their life choices. Moreover, as Young and others now argue, specialised disciplinary knowledge teaches the learner how to think in new and different ways – an important capability in this day and age (Bustin, 2019). Thus, we have a different interpretation of power: not power done to someone in order the exert control over them, but power as a capacity that can be grasped and developed by someone. This is the enabling power of knowledge. As Muller and Young write:

“Teachers are the crucial mediators of the transformative capacity of PK in their subjects. When they are successful, and the pupils learn successfully, the pupils become empowered in a range of ways: in the quality of their discernment and judgment; in their appreciation of the range and reach of the substantive and conceptual fields of the subject; and in their appreciation that the substantive detail they have learnt is only part of what the hinterland of the subject has to offer. They are able to make new connections, gain new insights, generate new ideas. That is why PK is at the heart of true schooling.” (Muller & Young, 2019: 213)

A personal perspective

I am writing this short reflective article from the vantage point of the tail end of 45 years in a professional life engaged in geography education. When I started out as a school teacher in 1974, having benefited from being one of Rex Walford’s first Cambridge tutees, I was also well aware of the US educationist Jerome Bruner. He had a short, hugely impactful book called The Process of Education (Bruner, 1960). It is a book about the importance of curriculum thinking. Amongst other things, such as stressing the importance of teachers grasping the ‘structure’ of the subjects they teach and of adequately ‘sequencing’ the material, he stated something startling and inspiring. He argued that “schools may be wasting precious years by postponing the teaching of many important (topics) on the grounds that they are too difficult” (Bruner, 1963: 12). He then really nailed this point at the beginning of chapter 3:

“We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development” (Bruner, 1963: 33)

Just think of it. Quantum mechanics; DNA; evolution; climate crisis; impressionist art; Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet; the slave trade; unequal distributions of wealth and wellbeing: these ideas/phenomena can be taught truthfully to all the youngsters you might encounter, in any school, anywhere. The implication that flows from this position is that it falls to teachers to rise to the substantial challenge of working out what Bruner’s words mean in the context of school geography, and how to do make ‘effective’ teaching happen. As a new teacher I accepted these responsibilities with alacrity, for it made teaching feel intellectually exciting as well as demanding and worthwhile. Moreover, looking back, the ambition in Bruner’s claim also adds considerable weight – or at least potential - to the sociologist David Baker’s notion of the ‘schooled society’ (Baker, 2014). This attempts to capture the realisation that, by and large, the vast majority of the world’s population now goes to school and around 20% even go on to higher education. This, Baker argues, has had weighty influence on all aspects of society and on how we see ourselves in the world. The question that arises of course is whether this influence has been entirely beneficial, and of course much hinges on the quality of the schooling received. In the context of, say, the climate emergency, open democratic societies must believe that imparting what Bruner called “general understanding” – the benefits of a “well-disciplined, well-stocked mind” (Bruner, 1963: 5) - is perhaps the enduring, but not always realised, purpose of formal education.

Looking back, I think my motivation as a school teacher (also as a trainer of teachers and subsequently in taking a more scholarly interest in the field of geography education research) has been wrapped up in the ambition behind Bruner’s fine words. I have always believed two things: that,

• there are ideas in geography that are immensely important and significant to teach young people, and

• it is both possible and desirable to teach these ideas to all young people.

I hold these beliefs because I want, as a geography teacher, to contribute to the expansion and deepening of what I now recognise as the intellectual capabilities of young people (in summary, to understand deeply aspects of place, space and environment, and to think cogently and relationally about the Earth as the home of humankind). It is this thinking that has underpinned the GeoCapabilities project (www.geocapabilities.org) which at the time of writing is in its third phase – with the focus on human migration, a complex matter often reduced and rationalised in school geography to an arid and somewhat intellectually dishonest ‘push and pull’ model. What to teach and how to do this ‘effectively’ (in the Brunerian sense) are the questions GeoCapabilities focusses on – after due consideration of who are the children we are teach and why we think geographical knowledge is of significance to them.

A word of realism

Now I must say, that if you hold such Brunerian beliefs and adopt what we might call a GeoCapabilities approach to school geography, which for me underpins high-quality curriculum-making possible to characterise as “Future 3” curriculum thinking (Beneker, 2018; Lambert, 2018; 2019), you have to be prepared for some hard thinking and even some resistance (see also Young & Lambert, 2014). To paraphrase Walter Parker’s words, (Parker, 2011; 2017) teachers will need to swim upstream against a multitude of systemic downstream currents of policy and organisational accountability procedures, standards and norms. Instead of ambition, imagination, understanding and joy in teaching, we have instead the stifling heavy hand of competence and compliance. But even in my country (England), well-known for its examinations and testing culture underscoring a neoliberal faith in the benefits of choice and competition, we now have an inspectorate who have belatedly begun to extoll the virtues of “hard curriculum thinking” (Spielman, 2018) and announce that future inspections will be based on criteria governing the “quality of education’ not pupil outcomes and crude metrics. We’ll see.

However, there are grounds enough to turn our attention to what evidence might signal high quality geography education. This is why I have been interested in the social realist notion of powerful knowledge and the agency of well-prepared school teachers to engage fruitfully in the dialogic practice of curriculum making (Lambert & Biddulph, 2015). This is not about specifying or re-writing standards, as if by just being yet more precise about telling teachers what to teach they will magically become more proficient. It is about returning to Bruner and focussing on the process of education and trusting teachers to rise to the challenge of ‘Future 3’ curriculum making.

So, back to the timely theme “recontextualising geography”. The organising concept recontextualization is derived from Basil Bernstein (2000), part of his so-called pedagogic device – the complicated process by which specialised knowledge production (typically conducted in research-oriented universities) informs and influences the business of communicating selections of knowledge to generations of learners, the primary task that falls to schools. Recent research (Kitson, forthcoming) has explored the degree to which teachers can and do play a contributory role as recontextualising agents (as Bruner implied they should). In her research Kitson studied teachers of physics, history and geography and a fascinating finding was that the model of recontextualization appeared to be least convincing in the case of geography. This, she surmised, might be to do with the breadth and hybrid nature of geography: indeed, the physical geographer Nick Clifford (2018) has recently raised the question whether geography can really be thought of as a discipline at all. And let us not forget that geography in schools predated university departments of geography by many decades. Geography also has a prominent place in the popular imaginary, possibly shaping what gets taught in schools as much as research outputs in the universities.

What’s left?

In the case of geography then, recontextualization is a particularly tricky idea and should be treated with caution. But teaching with intellectual honesty does require us to engage in some way with the untidy and unruly ‘discipline’ of geography to help us imagine a ‘school subject’ that can truly contribute to the process of education. This includes embracing as a virtue the dynamic and evolving nature of the discipline: for example, taking on what modern geography can tell us about masculinist and racist knowledges of the world; assimilating what is significant about global process in our apprehension of national boundaries and limits of nativist rhetoric and national exceptionalism; understanding the diverse, local human impacts around the world of the climate emergency.

In his deep and wide account of the economic, political and environmental settings in which schools (mainly in the UK context) undertake their work, John Morgan (2019) recently asked ‘What’s left for education? It is easy to feel impotent and perhaps cynical about the optimism that fuelled Bruner’s ambitious vision of curriculum, the idea at the heart of the process of education. And in truth, Morgan is understandably unable to come up with a definitive answer to his question. But he is clear that knowledge matters. What we teach children – and why we make the selections we do – is an important matter not to be treated lightly. Being interested in powerful, disciplinary knowledge is not just a matter of teaching effectively or efficiently. It is primarily concerned with the quality of what is being taught and for what purpose. It is about building teachers confidence as curriculum makers, where curriculum and pedagogy collide. In the end it is also about building society’s trust in teachers to impart a good general education to all young people.

David Lambert
Emeritus Professor of Geography Education,
UCL Institute of Education, London
[email protected]