Abstract
Since 2010 English education has seen a large and rapid shift in emphasis from a skills-based curriculum to one based on the idea of ‘core knowledge’, aligned with and given traction by the concepts of ‘cultural literacy’ (Hirsch) and ‘powerful knowledge’ (Young), and reliant on a belief that only ‘academically sanctioned’ knowledge is fit to offer students. This shift has led to a far-reaching reappraisal of the curriculum, prioritising traditional views of knowledge and content which in school geography have re-established a content heavy, traditional offer. This offer may lay some foundations for further study, but fails to engage students in crucial, more complex issues facing the planet, and facing them as citizens in the present and in the future. In this paper we outline what we see as being deficient in the current ‘core knowledge’ agenda, and offer instead an approach we refer to as a plexus curriculum. This is based on a more holistic approach to the subject which seeks to consider how various features of the geography curriculum can be interconnected for greater effect. This includes the intertwining of academic knowledge with the everyday, and the intertwining of different elements of the subject into more holistic and interdependent lenses. By using climate change, the Anthropocene and earth systems as a core conceptual framework around which the subject knowledge base is structured and interconnected, we argue that a plexus curriculum can develop a more critical and holistic understanding of geography, as well as playing a central role in developing geographical imaginations.
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Introduction
In 2010 there was the election of a new Government in the UK. The following period has seen large-scale and rapid shifts in many areas of policy and life in the country, not least within the area of education. Prior to 2010, a long-standing ‘New Labour’ government, first elected in 1997, had pursued an ongoing agenda of curriculum change. The then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, put education at the centre of his vision for a progressive British social and economic revolution, the ‘Third Way’ (Giddens 1998). Education was deemed a national priority as it was seen as the driving force for creating a competitive workforce; education was considered within this programme to drive economic development. The role of the curriculum was to some extent redefined to suit the perceived needs of employers which led to a shift from a more ‘traditional’ subject-focused curriculum to one emphasising a skills agenda. This shift might also be seen as part of a wider international trend, characterised by Sahlberg (2012) as the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM); a coming together of government policy with the needs and preferences of corporatism. Agencies such as the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) began to measure educational outcomes (e.g. Programme for International Student Assessment), prioritising big data to report on educational change. In the case of the World Bank, focusing attention on low income countries (e.g. World Bank 2010). The move towards a ‘skills-based curriculum’ led to a much greater emphasis on ‘21st Century skills’ such as creativity, problem-solving and ICT-based approaches (Saavedra and Opfer 2012). As a result of this shift some have argued that a coherent body of knowledge as core to the curriculum became increasingly marginalised and replaced by politicised subjects, for example citizenship (Whelan 2007).
With the coming to power of the Coalition government in 2010 Michael Gove became Secretary of State for Education. His tenure in this position lasted only four years but brought radical and rapid changes in policy and practice, a central element of which was a shift in the curriculum. He was critical of the curriculum developments under New Labour and called for a ‘renewal’ of the English curriculum (the other countries of the UK each have responsibility for their own education systems and policy). Where New Labour had championed a skills-based approach, Gove wanted a return to a knowledge-led curriculum, framed as liberalism:
The eminent Victorian, and muscular liberal, Matthew Arnold encapsulated what liberal learning should be. He wanted to introduce young minds to the best that had been thought and written… I want to argue that introducing the young minds of the future to the great minds of the past is our duty. (Gove 2011)
Gove discontinued many vocationally orientated qualifications and called for a greater degree of ‘rigour’ in more traditional, academic subjects. This rapidly led to new subject syllabi with expanded content, and greater input from university academics in deciding what that content should include. At the same time, a new quality assurance measure was created for schools, the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) which is now used as one measure of the quality of education provided by a school. EBacc measures the percentage of students who gain good grades in Maths, English, a Science, a Modern Foreign Language and a Humanities (either Geography or History). In much of the debate around these changes, the return to a traditional, academic and subject-based curriculum was often argued for on the basis of the work of two academics, E. D. Hirsch and Michael Young.
E. D. Hirsch and Cultural Literacy
Hirsch has become a central figure for some in the English curriculum debate. He is a professor emeritus of education and humanities at the University of Virginia who developed the concept of ‘Cultural Literacy’, out of which emerged the Core Knowledge movement. In the 1980s Hirsch noticed that some of his students appeared to have little background knowledge on which they could rely when attempting to understand the context of literary works. This led him to reflect that,
During the period of 1970-1985, the amount of shared knowledge that we have been able to take for granted in communicating with our fellow citizens has also been declining. More and more of our young people don’t know things we used to assume they did know. (1987: 5)
Hirsch believed that this lack of background knowledge was highly problematic because, without it, students would not be able to take part in the conversations which bind a culture together as there would be limited common understandings. Hence, as summarised by Cook (2009: 489) ‘According to Hirsch, what students need is a firm foothold in the shared background knowledge of literate culture which he terms “cultural literacy”’. Therefore, cultural literacy is argued to be essential as it determines an individual’s ability to understand and fluently take part within a given culture. This led to the acid test sometimes quoted around Hirsch’s ideas:
To be truly literate, citizens must be able to grasp the meaning of any piece of writing addressed to the general reader. All citizens should be able, for instance, to read newspapers of substance. (Hirsch 1987: 12)
At the centre of Hirsch’s concerns is that children from poor backgrounds who may not, on average, be exposed to the same level of knowledge as their richer peers, will have less cultural literacy. If this is the case, these children will find it more difficult to succeed in society as they will not have the same cultural resources on which to call as they grow up. He, therefore, saw the development of a core knowledge curriculum as a way of narrowing this cultural gap.
There are a number of critiques of Hirsch’s work, some of which centre on a belief that his model would lead to a narrow pedagogy based on the memorisation of facts and little else. For example, Christenbury (1989:14) writes, ‘cultural literacy encourages superficial notions of knowledge’. Whilst Scholes (quoted in Cook 2009: 491) reflected that cultural literacy
trivializes the concepts of culture and of literacy by suggesting that culture can be reduced to just 5000 bits of information and literacy to the passive possession of those bits.
Whilst these reviews tend to focus on cultural literacy as reductive and instrumental in nature, Cook goes on to develop a more nuanced reading of Hirsch. He stresses that the facts listed by Hirsch which are set out at the end of his book as ‘The List’ (approximately 5000 core facts all students should learn) should not be characterised as the whole curriculum and is offered only as an experiment. Scott (1988) highlights that Hirsch himself says that the list will almost certainly be misused and is only a heuristic and that the core knowledge agenda which results from Hirsch’s cultural literacy should only be seen as one element of a wider curriculum. Unfortunately, this aspect of his work appears to have been lost in translation as curricula based on a conceptualisation of core knowledge with strong resonances to ‘The List’ have emerged.
The use of cultural literacy as a framework for geography education can be traced back to the early 1990s and the creation of the National Curriculum in England. When the Geography Working Group (GWG) was formed to create the first National Curriculum, the geography curriculum of the 1970s and 1980s was argued by some (mainly beyond the subject) as being a deficit model of the subject with little focus on knowledge coverage. Dowgill and Lambert (1992) surmise that the GWG were steered towards the cultural literacy framework when developing the original National Curriculum attainment targets in geography. They begin to interrogate the likely impact of cultural literacy on geography and conclude that it appears to predominantly focus on locational knowledge and a regional view of the subject. They also find it difficult to place cultural literacy within the wider curricular context. Is it meant as an aim in the curriculum? Does it underpin the curriculum conceptually? Or is it merely a list of interesting content? Dowgill and Lambert (1992: 151) are left wondering what the place of cultural literacy is within the subject or indeed, as they inquire at the end of their consideration, ‘is geography (merely) an element in cultural literacy?’
The heavy influence of regional and locational geography can be seen in more recent developments in the Core Knowledge movement. Core Knowledge UK (http://www.coreknowledge.org.uk/index.php) have produced an outline curriculum for primary school geography which is wholly directed through the use of regions as the basis for the curriculum. Different processes are introduced within different regions, reducing place to location (Agnew 1987) with little sense of locale (a setting and scale for everyday processes and human action) and no ‘sense of place’ (including subjective feelings of place). This appears to relate to Dowgill and Lambert’s (1992) concern that cultural literacy, if not engaged with critically, may collapse into a list of facts, and may therefore become very descriptive in nature, a medium more suited to regional geography which Walford characterises, (quoted in Wood 2009:9),
The attraction of the regional curriculum frame was that pupils could be said to “cover the world” if they stayed with geography over five years of study; the knowledge base was complete, if superficial. (Walford 2001, p. 143)
Cultural literacy does play a useful role in curriculum thinking in that it stresses the need for consideration of the knowledge which is deemed important within a subject. But in a geographical context, this appears to translate into a fixation with locational knowledge which, whilst important, does not deal with knowledge as a network of ideas and concepts which together help develop an emerging holistic and critical understanding of major contexts and processes. Neither does it engage in any depth with questions about why some areas of knowledge are more important than others, other than a fairly vague idea of cultural discourse. This final point is, in a way, the starting point of the work of Michael Young.
Michael Young and Powerful Knowledge
Discussion around ‘powerful knowledge’, particularly in the context of school geography, might be understood as the meeting of two coinciding narratives. One is the journey of Michael Young’s (2008) thought from ‘social constructivism to social realism’, involving radical changes in his epistemological beliefs, including shifts in the significance and role that disciplines and subjects ought to play in education. The other is the journey of geography education research in developing increasingly critical accounts of knowledge in school geography. The latter provided a fertile environment for Young’s conception of ‘powerful knowledge’ to be widely engaged with in geography education. The nature of the relationship between geography as a school subject and geography as an academic discipline runs beneath both of these narratives. Different configurations of this relationship, and different conceptions of the discipline also play important roles in supporting—or potentially undermining—competing visions of what school subjects ought to be and do.
Critiques of knowledge in school geography have often used visual language of ‘seeing’ and ‘gazes’ in their claims that knowledge has been given insufficient attention. Whether this is the case or not is hard to assess: the claims are not made on the basis of empirical study of school geography or the longitudinal or comparative work that might be necessary for concluding that teachers’ and schools’ ‘attention’ had shifted focus. Nevertheless, these critiques seem to be widely accepted—including by those not writing from an explicitly ‘powerful knowledge’ perspective. These narratives also seem to be reflected more widely in the ways in which current Ofsted and DfE policy texts seem to construct narratives around previous ‘inattention’ to knowledge, and an urgent ‘return’ to subjects and core knowledge. One example in geography education is Morgan and Lambert’s (2011) argument that ‘thinking skills, learning to learn and the emotional dimensions of learning have assumed more immediate or urgent attention than a critical gaze on the material content of lessons’ (p. 281). Consequently, a narrowly defined focus on pedagogy ‘has marginalised knowledge in the practical day-to-day work of making the curriculum’ (p. 281). In Firth’s (2011) terms, ‘geographical knowledge … has been marginalised by the exigencies of everyday practice and the imperatives of policy’ (p. 312).
One example illustrating the readiness of geography education research to adopt the concept and associated discourse of powerful knowledge is Morgan’s (2011) paper Knowledge and the school geography curriculum: a rough guide for teachers. The education policy of the (then) previous 13 years of Labour government is summarised as ‘the creation of numerous education ‘strategies’ where the emphasis was on generic ‘learning’, free from any sense of subject or disciplines’ (p. 90). Using Young’s distinction between pedagogy as the ‘how’ and knowledge as the ‘what’ of the curriculum, Morgan summarises the critique from Young and others in these strong terms: ‘schools and teachers had become so focused on the ‘how’ of learning that the question of what was to be learned had been neglected’ (p. 90). The Importance of Teaching white paper (DfE 2010) is then presented by Morgan as making a ‘call for a return to focus on subject-based teaching and within that a concern with the core knowledge that makes up the subjects’ (Morgan 2011, p. 90). The choice of the term ‘core knowledge’ is notable; there are close, and mutually-reinforcing relationships between Young’s powerful knowledge and Hirsch’s core knowledge in these discourses around knowledge and school geography.
There have been a number of critiques of powerful knowledge, including Catling and Martin’s (2011) arguments for understanding children’s ‘everyday’ knowledge or ‘ethno-geographies’ as powerful. This argument aims to rearrange the dichotomous conceptualization of disciplinary knowledge as being ‘above’ children’s ethno-geographies, and instead sees the purpose of school geography as fostering a generative dialogue between a number of different types of knowledge which might—at least potentially—be equally ‘powerful’. Roberts (2014) is similarly critical of Young’s distinction between powerful and everyday knowledge. By engaging with academic geographers’ conceptions of ‘everyday’ knowledge, she develops her argument by suggesting a tension between the dichotomy underpinning Young’s powerful knowledge (that is, between everyday and powerful knowledges) and the ways in which disciplinary knowledge in geography has in several instances rejected this dichotomy.
Roberts’ (2014) paper followed a debate at the Institute of Education (UCL) between Young and Roberts, and there have been a number of other collaborations between Young and geography education researchers (e.g. Young et al. 2014). Taking the example academic urban geographies, Roberts’ critical engagement compares these approaches against Young’s criterion of powerful knowledge, summarised as being:
Conceptual as well as based on evidence and experience;
Reliable and in a broad sense ‘testable’ explanations or ways of thinking;
Always open to challenge;
Organised into domains with boundaries that are not arbitrary and these domains are associated with specialist communities such as subject and professional associations;
Often but not always discipline-based
(Roberts 2014, p.3)
One example of academic geographers’ engagement with everyday knowledges is Cloke et al. (2005) encouragement for undergraduates to be ‘aware of the human geographies wrapped up in and represented by the food you eat, the news you read, the films you watch, the music you listen to, the television you gaze at’ and to ‘think about how and what you read in books or articles connects or doesn’t to your everyday life and why that might be’ (p. 602). A later edition (Cloke et al. 2014) begins by arguing that geography is
…all around us, a part of our everyday lives…not confined to academic study but includes a host of more popular forms of knowledge through which we come to understand and describe our world. (p. xvi)
There are lines of enquiry to pursue around who ‘we’ might refer to, particularly in relation to Young’s sociological conception of communities, associations and disciplines (including the intriguing condition ‘often’), but not withstanding this, the boundaries between ‘academic study’ and ‘more popular forms of knowledge’ are clearly blurred. Stating that ‘Geography’ is ‘not confined to academic study’ creates a tension against dichotomous categorisations of powerful and everyday.
Another important way in which academic geography problematises knowledge, and which also creates tensions with ‘powerful knowledge’ is through discussion of representation, construction, and ‘the real’ (McCormack 2012). Young and Muller (2013) also contend that powerful knowledge is ‘real’, which may be tested by ‘whether the world answers to knowledge claims’ (p. 241), but as Roberts argues (following Daniels et al. 2008), geography is not a ‘direct reflection of a straightforward reality that is out there but a social construction … interpretations of the world differ from different vantage points in time and space’ (p. 2). Arguments around representation and construction are an important part of the ‘critical physical geography’ introduced below.
Both Hirsch and Young offer useful insights to the curriculum debate. However, there are also serious limitations to their work when related to geography education. To see the subject as merely a ‘list’ of knowledge to be covered is reductive and does not explicitly make clear the need to create a more networked conceptualisation of subject knowledge where choices about both content and its internal structuring are not considered. Unlike Hirsch, Young develops a more explicit consideration as to how subject content should be chosen. However, in doing so he has often discounted experiential knowledge which, particularly within a geographical context, must be seen as a core resource for contextualising and engaging with ‘disciplinary’ knowledge; indeed, there are important senses in which everyday knowledge is part of disciplinary knowledge. As with Hirsch, Young’s conception of powerful knowledge does not seem conducive to developing holistic understandings of the interconnections different elements of subject content. Where this holistic understanding is absent, aspects of subjects are reified and artificially treated as isolated ‘bits’, rather than as intrinsically and complexly linked aspects of a wider whole. It is this deficit in curriculum thinking that a plexus approach attempts to address and expand.
Defining the Plexus Curriculum
Once a curriculum is based upon the knowledge it contains there is the real threat that it will begin to be structured in a way that makes that knowledge atomistic. By this, we mean that there may be a tendency for the different elements of the curriculum to be taught in isolation from one another, leading to aspects of a subject being known, but the interconnections left implicit. This may well lead to students developing a series of uneven and poorly connected schema, giving them pools of expertise within a subject with little understanding of how the various elements fit together. To overcome this, there needs to be a more developed and explicit consideration of the various interconnections which exist across the different parts of a subject. This is the core of a plexus approach, which can be defined as,
An approach to education which focuses on the interconnections between issues, ideas, theories and methodologies to build holistic and complex networks of educational understanding. An approach which explores connecting processes and builds multi-dimensional perspectives.
In the context of a geography curriculum this means that we need to consider how each of the elements within a syllabus is networked to create a whole. How do different elements of a programme explicitly link together? What is the nature of the connections and how do we understand them? How can these connections be built into the curriculum to encourage the emergence of holistic networks of understanding?
Within a geographical context this requires us to begin to think about the different links there are between processes, environments, issues and concepts and how we might begin to bring these various perspectives together into a coherent whole. In other words, this is to think about a ‘knowledge led curriculum’ whose focus is on building holistic conceptual networks which allow students to build emergent geographical imaginations.
Gieseking (2017) reviews the changing meaning of geographical imagination from its origin in the work of Prince (1962), who saw imagination within geography as a way of bridging the subjective and objective, to more recent considerations of the interconnections between humans and nature and the ways in which these are understood and developed,
Increased discussions around climate change and the anthropocene indicate yet another shift in the geographical imagination around nature. (Gieseking 2017: 4)
This results in geographical imagination being the ways in which people think of and use space, and how they use their knowledge of these spaces to make decisions and value judgements. As Daniels (2011: 182) reflects,
As many writers on the theme have found, the geographical imagination in its various forms and meanings is a powerful ingredient of many kinds of knowledge and communication, within and beyond geography as an academic subject, as a way of envisioning the world, experiencing and reshaping it too.
Hence, a central aim of a plexus curriculum must be to develop the interconnections within and beyond the subject which over time allow for ever greater opportunities to envisage the world in—at least some—of its complexity. At the same time, this expanding imagination should also allow students to begin to consider how the knowledge they are engaged with might point towards new and interesting ways of reshaping the world around them. A plexus curriculum therefore aims to develop interconnections within the subject content which it embraces. It does this, in part, to aid the emergence of a geographical imagination within students to help them make sense of their world whilst also demonstrating the contribution geographical knowledge can make in thinking about future issues and bringing about change.
A Conceptual Framework for a Plexus Curriculum in Geography
To develop a coherent conceptual framework for a plexus curriculum in geography, we need to develop some core concepts around which a knowledge base can be structured. We suggest that in addition to the normal geographical concepts such as place, space and scale, large substantive geographical issues can productively contribute to this conceptual core, based on their complex, synthetic nature. The concepts discussed here are climate change, the Anthropocene and earth systems.
Climate Change
climate change can act as a strong unifying concept as it requires a number of interconnections across a geography curriculum to be explored to develop a holistic understanding of climate change itself. For example, to understand climate change at a planetary scale there needs to be an understanding of long-term natural processes such as orbital forcing/Milankovitch Cycles. To understand the process of anthropogenic climate change it is then important to engage with atmospheric processes, some atmospheric chemistry and sources of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. Having started to engage with these physical processes, understandings of the links to human economic activity, its relation to energy use and economic development need to be explored. There also needs to be an understanding of how societies might mitigate some of the impacts and work to minimise the sources of climate change. In this way there is clear potential to begin to synthesise elements of the pre-existing curriculum by using a climate change lens. In a number of examination specifications at GCSE (examinations sat by 16-year olds in England) and A-level (examinations sat by 18-year olds in England) climate change is studied, but always as a discrete issue. Therefore, its complex and overarching nature is lost. A plexus approach aims to overcome this.
Anthropocene
including this concept as a core aspect of a plexus curriculum begins to make more explicit the links between human and physical systems. Too often, school geography treats human geography and physical geography as being essentially separate entities. However, it is now the case that humans have had such an acute and far ranging impact on the physical sphere (Schwagerl 2014), that it is no longer possible to treat these two arms of the subject as being divorced from one another (if it ever has been; see, for example, Goudie 1986). Numerous examples can now begin to be explored which bring these two areas of the subject together and interconnect them in various ways. Using the Anthropocene as a context also extends out the critical investigation and analysis of humans and their interactions with their environment beyond that of climate change. This includes considerations of biodiversity (McGill et al. 2015), relationships between humans and their environments (Angus 2016), the impacts of economic systems on the natural environment and also the processes increasingly affecting humans due to climate change such as loss of habitable land and mass migration. In all of these cases using the Anthropocene as an organising concept allows for the explicit discussion of a number of interconnections between the traditionally isolated schemes of work which tend to occur in many geography courses. Here, knowledge is developed ‘in-between’ traditional foci to create more connected schema amongst students.
Earth Systems
much of the physical geography taught within geography curricula tends to focus on specific physical systems, most often rivers, coasts, and glacial landscapes. Whilst these are all legitimate areas of study, this approach tends to under-represent any notion of how these systems relate to planetary scale physical systems. As students begin to develop their understanding of each of these systems, it is important for them to begin to gain a clear and explicit understanding of how they are interrelated. For example, it is rare for the interconnections between rivers and coasts to be developed in any consistent manner other than to explain that delta morphology relates to the relative energy and sediment supply from the river and coast systems. If we begin to develop clearer and more critical understandings of how the various physical systems operate together in complex ways, then students can begin to build more holistic understandings of the physical systems which are responsible for planetary characteristics.
Connections are no less true of human systems and processes such as globalization, the rise of technology, mass migration and the impact of these processes on urban areas, transport systems and human land use. Given that many of these issues are also impacted by physical processes and in turn impact those processes, involving students in more explicit exploration of the interconnections involved is necessary for the curriculum to help them understand the complexity of the issues which they and their societies increasingly face and construct.
We suggest these 3 concepts as a core framework for considering how to develop interactions within the geography curriculum. We argue that these concepts and the interconnected knowledge which surround them will be increasingly important to any understanding of news and current affairs for the general reader moving into the immediate and medium-term future. This is Hirsch’s acid test for cultural literacy, and hence, we argue that this approach also meets the test of a core knowledge agenda in addition to the aim of holistic understanding and complexity that we have argued for. By placing these concepts at the core of a network of knowledge, individuals have the potential to develop a holistic understanding of major issues that are occurring in the world and therefore should be at the centre of any developing geography education. By using these concepts as a core framework for encouraging an explicit consideration of interconnections, knowledge and understanding become the starting points for critical and imaginative engagement with the subject.
It is important to think about how the core concepts and knowledge might be operationalized together to give a practical basis for a curriculum. The nature of the interconnections chosen should be decided by teachers as curriculum makers deciding what would work best for their own context. Here, we give three examples of recent approaches which could serve to exemplify interconnections across geography and relate back to our chosen core concepts.
The first example of how a number of geography issues can begin to be brought together in a holistic way is through the heterodox economics model of Raworth’s (2017) ‘doughnut economics’. Raworth takes as a starting point the idea that we need to evolve an economic perspective which emphasises the insight that the earth has limits in terms of resource use and sustainability. This is an economic model which takes account of humans’ reliance on particular environments. She highlights the need for a stable climate, fertile soils and biodiversity, and understands that there is a spectrum of activities humans required for communities to operate in a sustainable and positive manner, whilst also realising that there is an ecological ceiling to economic activity. Go beyond this ceiling and human activity begins to have adverse impacts on earth systems. Doughnut economics would therefore offer one lens through which interconnections between economic, social, environmental and physical geography could be encountered by students. Over a period of time they would begin to understand how economic activity can have an impact not only on humans but also on physical systems through a more coherent and complex engagement with the spectrum of processes involved than would be the case in more ‘traditional’ geography curricula.
A second lens offering exciting potential for understanding the complexities of physical systems is to introduce the model of the ‘critical zone’. Sullivan et al. (2017: 1) describes critical zone (CZ) science as having,
created a transdisciplinary nexus that seeks to understand the response of Earth’s near surface processes to climatic and human perturbations. CZ science brings together researchers from geology, soil science, geomorphology, hydrology, meteorology, and ecology to study Earth’s living skin from bedrock to the top of vegetation.
The critical zone is a relatively new concept identifying the boundary layer where rock, soil, water, air and living organisms interact to regulate the natural habitat. It therefore determines the health of ecosystems, biodiversity and ultimately our survival via food production through agriculture, water quality for human use, and so on. The US National Science Foundation has created a number of critical zone observatories which are interdisciplinary in nature and as such not only show the interconnections between various physical processes operating at a number of scales and their interactions with humans, but also help students begin to understand that disciplinary boundaries are porous and that many interconnections occur between disciplines in an attempt to understand complex and difficult problems. Sullivan et al. (2017) have begun to establish some of the links between human dependence and the natural processes within the critical zone, such as the impact of human activity on processes and the nature of the critical zone, and in turn, how changes in the critical zone impact on human activities. Field et al. (2015) focus on the potential to use a knowledge of the critical zone to understand the potential of ‘ecosystem services’, the potential for ecosystems to supply products which can be used by society. By considering the processes in the critical zone, including how they create and regulate the zone, and how they become the basis for human activity, we are able to begin to think in terms of how weather, rivers, soils and ecosystems interact, and how these interconnected processes are linked to resource supply and exploitation. This then opens up consideration of how changes in climate, levels of human exploitation, and their interactions with physical systems create sustainable or unsustainable environments. Obviously, the detail which is covered would depend on the age of the students, but simple links could be made at lower levels within the school system, with increasing detail and criticality as students progress.
The final lens we exemplify here is ‘critical physical geography’ (CPG). In their discussion of CPG, Lave et al. (2014: 3) state,
Its central precept is that we cannot rely on explanations grounded in physical or critical human geography alone because socio-biophysical landscapes are as much the product of unequal power relations, histories of colonialism, and racial and gender disparities as they are of hydrology, ecology, and climate change.
Therefore, an important aspect of physical geography focuses on attempting to understand how physical systems and human social economic processes interact to have an impact on both the physical systems themselves and the humans who operate in them. Simple examples might be to consider the ‘industrial’ landscapes of agriculture, and of water extraction in the case of reservoirs and dams. As well as the more obvious discussions over why reservoirs and agriculture are necessary, and how they impact on the physical environment, CPG opens additional foci for consideration, for example how agricultural policies impact on agricultural activity and how this then impacts on physical and biotic processes. An interesting spin on this focus is also to consider how physical systems begin to work with human environments to produce hybrid landforms. Dixon et al. (2018: 118) capture the development of urban weathering and the production of what they call Anthropocene regolith,
If the stone fabric of the urban landscape is considered as an Anthropocene geological formation, then over decadal timescales weathering processes will develop Anthropocene urban regoliths as well as more intensively reshaped surfaces.
They go on to identify urban stalactites and stalagmites, the result of leaching of calcite from concrete, and at a larger scale urban sink holes, which they characterise as an Anthropocene geohazard. Including the study of these processes and landforms within the physical geography of school curricula helps to illustrate the complexity of the interconnections between physical and human environments and processes.
Towards a Conceptual Model of a Plexus Curriculum in Geography
Our conceptualisation of a plexus curriculum has at its core the idea that we need to build a more holistic engagement with the knowledge base of geography. Figure 22.1 sets out an initial conceptual model which we believe could inform curriculum thinking to develop a plexus approach.
At the core of the model are is the conceptual framework which acts as the structure for interconnecting the chosen disciplinary knowledge. In practice, the knowledge base might not be dissimilar from pre-existing curricula, but in a plexus approach, it is reworked to allow explicit links and interconnections to be explored. These interconnections can use various frameworks for structuring and exploring content. An example might be the linking of physical and urban geography through a lens of critical physical geography, exploring pseudo-karst processes which are a result of processes linked to the Anthropocene. Likewise, climate change can be explored through the lens of doughnut economics as it relates to globalisation, industrialisation and environmental degradation.
As the knowledge base of the curriculum is developed, and interconnections built, it is important to iteratively relate what is learned back to student experience and reflection. This allows students to locate themselves and their communities within their emerging understanding of geographical issues and processes. With this being an iterative process, student experience is also co-opted into the curriculum by acting as the foundation for asking questions and exploring the subject further, and through this approach personal experience and disciplinary knowledge become complementary aspects of the curriculum.
Finally, the interplay of these aspects of a plexus curriculum are the basis for developing students’ geographical imaginations. As outlined by Daniels (2011) the development of the geographical imagination acts as the foundation for both understanding the world and envisioning how it might be reshaped. The powerful knowledge of geography is given its power not as abstract disciplinary content, but as an emerging core for critical and holistic engagement with geographical issues.
The concepts we have chosen as the core to the process of developing interconnected knowledge we see as being crucial to understanding the complex and shifting nature of the planet. This is why we have put them at the core of our model. However, this is in some ways a thought experiment; a way of beginning to engage with the need for developing holistic rather than atomistic knowledge and understanding through a geography curriculum. Therefore, we would encourage teachers to consider if these are the concepts which they believe should sit at the centre of the process, or whether in their own context, with their own expertise, they believe alternative concepts would work as a better foundation for interconnected thinking. As curriculum makers, teachers should have opportunity for dialogue and discussion as to what should sit at the conceptual core of their work. But whatever concepts are deemed central, they should allow for a structuring of the knowledge within the subject in such a way that the interconnected, holistic nature of the subject is explored and made explicit for students. At a time when our planet is endangered, we need individuals who can think holistically and critically—and developing this in individual students and across and between societies and cultures is a task for education that no-one should underestimate.
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Wood, P., Puttick, S. (2019). A Plexus Curriculum in School Geography—A Holistic Approach to School Geography for an Endangered Planet. In: Leal Filho, W., Hemstock, S. (eds) Climate Change and the Role of Education. Climate Change Management. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32898-6_22
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