The main purpose of this article is to expose and disrupt discourses dominating global development in an English school geography textbook chapter. The study was prompted by a teacher's encounter with cultural difference in a geography lesson in South Korea. I investigate the issues raised through the lens of a new curriculum policy in English…

Teaching demands engagement with a diverse world. When teaching about distant places, school textbooks commonly employ mediation devices of comparison, contrast and narratives of change. To what extent are such pedagogical strategies inherently othering? This question is addressed in the context of representations of Japan in English geography…

Drawing on a Levinasian ethical perspective, the argument driving this paper is that the technical accountability movement currently dominating the educational system in England is less than adequate because it overlooks educators' responsibility for ethical relations in responding to difference in respect of the other. Curriculum policy makes a…

This study outlines some challenges of teaching about distant place and demonstrates how different strategies can influence school students' framings of diversity. The analysis is based on an interpretive case study of 13-14?year-old students learning about Japan in a UK school. Their changing representations of Japan were tracked in detail over a…

This paper considers the impact of a small-scale action research project which focused on the development of an emergent approach to curriculum making in a general certificate in secondary education course in geography. In this context, we argue that complexity thinking offers a useful theoretical foundation from which to understand the nature of…

Many observers have commented on disparities between the theoretical understandings of environmental education portrayed in academic literature and the environmental education that takes place in schools. In much of the literature and in curriculum documents there has been an increasing emphasis on promoting positive attitudes towards the…