Towards an Educational Case for Social and Political Issues in the Geography Curriculum

Abstract

While social and political issues have an important role in the geography curriculum, the long-term erosion of the value and insularity of disciplinary knowledge in society and the curriculum has blurred the distinction between educational aims and political advocacy in classrooms. Increasingly, teachers, policy makers, and NGOs instrumentalize the curriculum with respect to their political objectives, including climate change and social injustice. In taking an advocacy approach to pedagogy, they potentially undermine liberal educational objectives, including the development of autonomy and subjectification. Drawing on recent work in philosophy of education (e.g. Biesta; Van Poeck and Östman) as well as Social Realist approaches to knowledge, I make a case for teaching about social and political issues on liberal educational grounds. Geography plays a key role in the school curriculum by providing a space for exploring the human condition through the study of people in contrasting environments and cultural systems. Here, we examine how geography teachers can handle issues in a morally careful way and navigate a line between advocacy and educational aims. One key difference examined is the need to treat students as subjects in their own right and to help develop skills of moral enquiry. In practice this means encouraging an open-ended approach, exploring topics (and the values underpinning them) from a range of perspectives, developing sensitivity to difference, and showing tolerance for ideas of which one disapproves. For students to develop agency and moral independence, they must learn how to think about social and political issues rather than being told what to think.