The integrated status of Social Studies in the Norwegian "Curriculum for Knowledge Promotion in Primary and Secondary Education and Training 2020" reflects an international educational trend pertaining to a movement from knowledge and traditional disciplinary thinking to generic skills, competence and boundary crossing. This article…

This essay reviews and builds upon Aníbal Quijano's contribution to decolonial theory to sketch out what I refer to as the geopolitics and coloniality of curriculum, broadly understood as an imperial doctrine and a pedagogical mode of domination aimed at producing a modern/colonial subjectivity. It argues that the geopolitics and coloniality of…

This article builds up a sketch of the vertical movements within knowledge to argue for the importance of abstract systematised knowledge within horizontal knowledge domains such as geography. Unfolding as a narrative, the first section draws on realist theories of knowledge to discuss the basis for two contrasting directions of epistemic movement…

This article explores the relationship between disciplinary knowledge and subject pedagogy, utilising Maton's Legitimation Code Theory (LCT). It suggests ways that LCT could help facilitate deeper communication both within and between subject communities, providing a conceptual framework that gets beneath empirical manifestations to identify…

Fieldwork has always been an important component in the teaching of ecology in England's secondary schools where it has been delivered almost exclusively as part of the biology curriculum for nearly 70 years. However, historical evidence shows that both the quantity and quality of ecology fieldwork has been declining in recent decades at a time…

The forces of globalisation affect the lives of everybody on the planet--but defining the concept of globalisation, and its appropriate place within the school curriculum, still proves problematic. This article engages with three key issues: our understanding and conceptualisation of globalisation; the impacts of globalisation on education; and…

This article considers disciplinary-based knowledge and its recontextualisation and acquisition in the secondary school curriculum. It starts from the premise that teaching disciplinary knowledge is important. The focus is the subject of geography and the increasingly influential realist school of thought in the sociology of education and the…

The argument has been propounded that academic disciplines and school subjects provide a powerful, authoritative knowledge which is key to enabling children to better understand the world in which they live. Inherent in this perspective is that children's experience, knowledge and understanding are poorly formed and of limited everyday use and…

This article presents a framework for understanding geographical knowledge in the context of the National Curriculum in England. It offers a cautious welcome to the 2010 White Paper in that it places emphasis on teaching and the role of teachers in selecting what is taught: it is broadly sympathetic to the policy thrust which seeks to rebalance…

This article reports data from a larger study investigating the changing patterns of entry for GCSE geography over the last 20 years, but focuses on the period 2003-7. Entries for geography GCSE have fallen since 1996 but the patterns vary with attainment, type of school and geographical location. It is shown that government policy has both a…

This study is interested in understanding the configurations of knowledge underpinning three examples of curriculum policy texts in the specific case of the school subject of geography. The three policy texts are the 1991 Geography National Curriculum (GNC), the "Opening minds" curriculum and the GNC 2007. I start with the proposal that…

VISOLE (Virtual Interactive Student-Oriented Environment) is a teacher-facilitated pedagogical approach to integrating constructivist online game-based learning into formal curriculum teaching in school education. This paper reports a case study on the implementation of VISOLE in secondary Geography education. We compared the pedagogical…

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…

In this article we present evidence linking an improvement in students' conceptions of quality in their work in geography with improvements in the outcomes of their learning. In the first part of the article we develop a rationale for the approach to formative assessment employed in this research. Our results are derived from testing this approach…

'Europe' has been increasingly 'invented' and 'reinvented' in discussions about education, curricula and identities over the last five decades. The 'European dimension in education' was a term increasingly used by the European Union and the Council of Europe to denote their educational policies encouraging national educational systems to endorse a…