Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) is used to describe the knowledge teachers use to teach a specific subject to a specific audience. Although PCK is linked to student success and motivation, relatively little is known about the PCK of geography teachers. Through a mixed methods approach, we surveyed a group of 73 Dutch pre-service teachers in…

During the 2015 sudden rise in migration movements in Europe, approximately 2.4 million refugees arrived in Europe and 1.2 million asylum applications were received in the European Union countries. We were interested in finding out whether these rapid changes and the polarised attitudes represented in the media affected young people's attitudes…

The question what the focus of climate change education should be has been debated by academics and policy makers. However, this debate is informed to only a limited extent by empirical research on the position of teachers. Based on interviews with nineteen experienced secondary geography teachers in the Netherlands, nine orientations were…

This paper investigates how the teaching and learning about "wicked" environmental problems may be fostered through an educational approach premised on futuring -- the active imagination of the future. The growing academic interest in possible and desirable futures provides a promising starting point for restructuring education as…

Tasks are crucial for gaining access to powerful knowledge in geography and for fostering higher-order thinking in lessons; therefore, they are key to subject-specific pedagogy. After analysing tasks in geography textbooks for upper secondary education, it was revealed that higher-order thinking barely occurs in textbooks in the Netherlands and is…

Teachers' classroom assessment practices tend to encourage rote learning instead of meaningful learning. To enhance teachers' classroom assessment practices, teacher involvement in assessment construction appears necessary. To foster teacher professional growth in relation to this issue, a professional development programme on summative assessment…

GeoCapabilities offers an approach for unlocking powerful disciplinary knowledge (PDK) for children. In phase three of the project, we are exploring how far GeoCapabilities 'works' for teachers serving communities in challenging socio-economic circumstances. We connect GeoCapabilities to social justice in education, theoretically. Then, using the…

Like all school textbooks, geography textbooks are authored. Almost all textbook research in and beyond geography has neglected their authors. This questionnaire-based multinational research project investigated the perceptions of 71 primary and secondary school geography textbook authors from seven countries in five continents. Though not…

Relational thinking is a necessary skill for building students' individual capabilities and a core concept in geography education. Geographical relational thinking refers to being able to give interrelated, causal explanations for geographical phenomena such as regional change. The aim of this study was to gain more insight into differences in…

Teachers should have the necessary assessment knowledge and skills to contribute to students' learning. This study provides insight into how a professional development program for teachers contributed to the achievement of higher mastery levels of assessment literacy. This study used Xu and Brown's TALiP (Teacher Assessment Literacy in Practice)…

Research on the use(fulness) of student-led film has emphasized the benefits of combining fieldwork and the production of moving image in terms of active, deep and reflexive learning. This paper contributes to this literature by discussing how a video documentary assignment can (also) help fostering relational thinking -- a main objective of human…

Climate change adaptation is a notorious example of a wicked problem. Teachers need to have extensive knowledge to design high-quality education that addresses the wickedness and contributes to wicked problem-solving. The components of the knowledge basis for teaching climate change issues can be highlighted with the Pedagogical Content Knowledge…

This article explores the usefulness of Maude's translation of Young's idea of powerful knowledge into geography education. Maude's classification of five types of powerful knowledge in geography education was used to analyse the written curriculum of the 'human and society' interdisciplinary domain in four schools in the Netherlands. The…

This article explores how geography textbooks and missionary stories were used to persuade Dutch primary schoolchildren of the moral righteousness of the Ethical Policy for the Dutch East Indies between 1890 and 1910. Educative discourses targeting Dutch children were instrumentalized in order to recruit the next generation of missionaries,…

Setting tasks plays a key role in geography lessons, as they enable students to engage with the subject content, guide lessons towards predefined learning outcomes, and are therefore important for assessment. At the same time, the use of tasks is complex as numerous aspects regarding the content and the students have to be taken into account.…