Bridging the divide between school and university geography

Recent research within geography education reveals concerns about how geography teachers can further develop their roles as ‘boundary workers’, who successfully engage with academic geography/geographers to construct appropriate school curricula. Whilst rejecting any notion of geography teachers simply ‘delivering’ aspects of academic geography content to unwilling recipients, there is a real demand for research into the processes of successful geography curriculum-making. The existence of a persistent 'gap' between school and university geography, which hampers such work, is increasingly well documented (Bonnett 2003, Clifford 2002, Thrift 2002). This discontinuity is keenly felt by many geography graduates who enter initial teacher training, only to discover that the geography syllabuses they teach in schools reflect very little of the themes and content recently studied within the academy. Established teachers also experience this problem, which professional associations and learned societies similarly struggle to address - despite their enthusiastic promotion of curriculum materials, seminars and conferences, and continuing professional development for geography teachers.
I am enthusiastic about supervising applicants who wish to explore the nature of the divide between schools and university with regard to geography education, particularly in the field of curriculum making. Research would be ‘futures oriented’ (Butt 2011) and the precise design and methods to be used would be decided as part of the project, although the study methods are likely to be qualitative in nature.