Hafsa Garcia and Alex Standish.

The outcry over Professor Danny Dorling’s suggestion that geography was for ‘posh’ but ‘dim’ students has furthered the discussion in the community about the lack of diversity within its student and teaching body. However, it is disingenuous to dismiss his claims as ‘entirely anecdotal and unsubstantiated’, as a group of colleagues has done in The THE.

The geography community has long been aware of its tendency to attract likeminded individuals from more wealthy families. Here, we share some research that looks at the reasons for this and how geography needs to change if it is going to become more inclusive.  

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David Lambert. 
Teachers, generally speaking, work incredibly hard. They work under highly controlled and high stakes conditions, and very publicly. So how do teachers feel about their work? Is teaching a confident profession?
I believe that the profession, at least in secondary schools, may have collectively lost the plot in terms of its core values and purposes. It is buffeted this way, then that way, and in trying to keep up it has lost its heart to the empty process of delivering performance indicators. I don’t blame the teachers themselves, but I do argue that teachers can and should take a more active role in curriculum leadership – a theme in a forthcoming special feature of the London Review of Education (16.3) which I have had the privilege of guest editing.
Recently, I had the great pleasure to spend the afternoon with some enormously impressive, mostly young, new teachers. I spent the entire time challenging their expectations, sometimes showing and explaining, often debating with them … as to what it means to teach geography well, and why this is so important. Possibly not the geography you remember from school. Maybe not even the geography they experienced as students. But worthwhile, engaging geography lessons exhibiting the highest quality (more…)