Future geography teachers for the planet. Powerful (disciplinary) knowledge and education for sustainable development (ESD) in initial teacher education (ITE)

Abstract

Environmental sustainability is not a new issue, but the current imperatives the global community faces call for urgent action in building powerful knowledge of ESD in ITE. We are living in the geological age dubbed the Anthropocene to highlight this as the period during which human’s activities dominate the environment. Climate change as an (inter)generational global issue has moved masses of mostly young adults across the world. Protests, such as Fridays for Future have attracted young people and increased their political engagement, yet what they learn about climate and its dynamics at school is limited. Geography education is claimed as a key discipline that can impact on their knowledge, alongside parents and mass media as sources of information. As members of this scholarly community, we argue that there is an urgent need to better build powerful knowledge of ESD in teacher preparation so that teachers can confidently play a key role in helping young people understand and respond to the climate emergency. Over the last decades, IRGEE became a mirror of the expanding interests of Geography educators around the globe. While a broadening of our research interests takes place, historical meta-studies (for the German-speaking countries, cf. Bagoly-Simó & Hemmer, 2017) uncovered a range of topics that have held the uninterrupted attention of Geography educators. Along with map skills and spatial orientation, as a scholarly community, we tend to keep matters of geographical knowledge and ESD high on our agenda. Both the Lucerne Declaration on Geographical Education for Sustainable Development (Haubrich, Reinfried, & Schleicher, 2007) and the revisited International Charter on Geographical Education (IGU-CGE, 2016) documented our previous efforts and outlined possible future steps, recognizing the vital links between research in geography education and allied areas of education for sustainability. Indeed, equipping students with geographical knowledge suitable to both recognize less sustainable behavior and strive for viable alternative to achieve a more sustainable future, is one of the core contributions of Geography as a school subject to the education of young individuals. In contrast to other subjects, as empirical studies show, Geography has a strong conceptual (Bagoly-Simó, 2014) and thematic (Bagoly-Simó, 2013) affinity to sustainable development. Its objectives often overlap with those of ESD. However, the specifics of the nature of geographical knowledge required to make this significant contribution continue to require our attention. Notably in 2018 our scholarly community examined the prospects for ESD and signalled the need for further research (Chang & Kidman, 2018). Two years later, in IRGEE’s 2020 special issue, scholars reported on the GeoCapabilities approach which has powerful disciplinary knowledge at its heart. In this approach, Geography educators ask in what respect is geographical knowledge powerful. We take from the special issue that knowledge which builds young people’s capacity for geographical reasoning can be powerful in responding to a world that is changing, as indeed it is. A fertile typology of powerful geographical knowledge has been developed by Alaric Maude (2018) that can be applied in analyzing knowledge (e.g., Béneker & Palings, 2017). It seems to us that powerful (disciplinary) knowledge depends as much on how we teach.