This article examines the urban and pedagogical imaginations that underpin the Editors' call for papers in this special issue of EER. It raises two concerns. The first is that the view of the "urban" that underpins work in this field, whilst offering some new insights, tends to overlook the powerful forces and structures that produce…

Although there are surprisingly few academic books about geography with the term "future" or "futures" in their titles, this paper indicates that for much of the twentieth century geographers contributed to important discussions about the shape of worlds to come. The paper offers a review of these debates within Anglo-American…

In this article the value of critical research to research in geography education is considered. It raises the question as to whether the geography education community requires a wider range of orientations to research, concerned as we are with its impact on classroom practice, policy-making and future directions for geography education. (Contains…

This short article explores the role of theory in the field of research in geographical education in the UK. It suggests that the fact that the field is dominated by teacher educators has led to the adoption of theories closely associated with the classroom practice of teachers. Although in the 1980s there were signs that geographical education…

This article addresses the question of what "radical school geography" might look like in the present historical moment. It traces the history of a distinctive "radical" tradition in school geography, most prominently associated with the work of John Huckle, who argued for the importance of understanding the content and pedagogy of school…

This article is about the images of economic space that are found in school curricula. It suggests the importance for educators of evaluating these representations in terms of the messages they contain about how social processes operate. The article uses school geography texts in Britain since the 1970s to illustrate the different ways in which…

The development of national education systems was premised on the assumption that they would offer particular representations of the "national space", and school subjects such as geography and history offered pupils specific accounts of space and time. The project of European integration suggests the need for school curricula to offer…

This paper considers influences on the contemporary school curriculum in England. It does so mainly through a critical analysis of one significant critique of the curriculum made by the think tank Civitas in their collection of essays asserting the "corruption" of the curriculum, published in 2007. The paper places the Civitas position…