Changing Horizons in Geography Education - HERODOT Network ...

focused on landscape, climate, population and contrasts between north and south.School E included a more enquiry-based approach with pupils being asked to investigatewhether the north/south divide was still valid. School E had developed a seriesof activities designed to develop ‘thinking skills’ through the study of Italy.When studying the themes prescribed in the GNC, teachers chose very few illustrativecase studies from Europe. The examples included: tourism in Majorca, Benidormand the Alps; migration from Kosovo; volcanoes in Italy and pollution in the NorthSea. Thus, the map of Europe constructed in these schools was as peculiar as the worldmaps in Schools A, B and C. Italy dominated the study of Europe. Areas of neglectincluded Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Germany and the Republic of Ireland.In all six interview schools, the places studied were almost all chosen by theteacher; pupils had extremely limited opportunities to choose which places theystudied or to incorporate their own personal experiences of place into their studyof geography. There was little evidence that teachers consciously thought about theworld they were constructing through the curriculum. Views differed on whether thepatterns of attention and neglect mattered. Some thought that pupils should have aframework of knowledge about places and a sense of place and attempted to developthis a bit through map work and quizzes. Others thought it was more important todevelop a range of skills than to develop knowledge about particular places.DiscussionJust as every map projection distorts in its own way, so did the curriculum choices ofeach geography department. There were distinct patterns of attention and neglect.The countries that received the most attention were Italy, Japan, Brazil and Kenya,which I’ll term the ‘big four’. This is an odd list. Although these countries werenamed in the first GNC, this is insufficient to explain their dominance. Other countriesspecified in GNC 1991 such as USA, Germany and China are almost totallyneglected now.There are several reasons why the big four have become so dominant. Hopkins(2001) studied the shape of the world constructed through the different textbooksseries produced for successive versions of the GNC. He noted the emergence of alimited number of countries for study (Brazil, Kenya, India, Italy and Japan) andthe neglect of countries that might have significance for minority groups in England(e.g. Pakistan). Three of the ‘big four’, Italy, Japan and Kenya, were selected forinclusion in the first edition of Key Geography (Waugh and Bushell, 1991), whichbecame by far the most popular of the textbook series written for GNC 1991. KeyGeography books had been used at some stage by 82% of the survey schools, with74% continuing to use them. Choices made by textbook authors became furtherentrenched as producers of television programmes, atlases and textbooks tendedto follow the dominant choices. The curriculum position of the ‘big four’ becamefurther embedded by schools linking the study of themes with the chosen countries,e.g. linking Brazil with the study of tropical rainforests, and Italy and Japan withthe study of volcanoes and earthquakes. A sort of curriculum inertia has now set inwith teachers continuing with their existing choices even when not constrained by61