Geography, Capabilities, and the Educated Person

This chapter introduces the GeoCapabilities project (www.geocapabilities.org) to explore school geography’s contribution to citizenship education. This was a three-year EU funded project which finished its funded work in early 2017, although its ideas will continue to evolve because it has built considerable and widespread momentum internationally with associate partners across Europe, USA, China, Japan and Australasia. The project was oriented on developing leadership capacity in secondary school teachers of geography, focusing on the significance of teachers’ ‘curriculum making’ responsibilities (Lambert and Biddulph, 2014; Lambert 2016). Led from London (UCL Institute of Education), and with a US Partner (the American Association of Geographers [AAG]) it draws strongly from Anglo-American traditions of curriculum studies and school level curriculum ‘enactment’ (Doyle & Rosemartin, 2012) but has gained substantially from north European traditions of subject didactics (see Hudson 2016), working with the ‘didactic triangle’ and heuristic of subject, teacher and student.