Initial thoughts on developing a plexus curriculum in geography

1. A Plexus Curriculum – a holistic
approach to school geography for
an endangered planet
INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON
CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE ROLE OF
EDUCATION
Phil Wood & Steve Puttick
Bishop Grosseteste University

2. Contextualising the Geography Curriculum in English Secondary Schools
• Pre-2010, New Labour Government. Focus on a skills-based curriculum as a basis for
employability
• Post-2010 the ‘Govean Revolution’. Many changes in the system. Curriculum focus
saw radical change
• Renewed focus on knowledge at the centre of the curriculum together with a return
of more traditional approaches to teaching and learning
• Led to the co-opting of two academics as a basis for characterising knowledge

3. The Nature of Knowledge in the Reformed Curriculum
• E D Hirsch. American Literature academic. Believes that children from poor backgrounds lack a core
‘cultural knowledge’ leaving them unable to take a full part in society
“During the period of 1970-1985, the amount of shared knowledge that we have been able to take for
granted in communicating with our fellow citizens has also bee declining. More and more of our young
people don’t know things we used to assume they did know.” (1987: 5)
• Development of ‘cultural literacy’ and core knowledge curricula
“To be truly literate, citizens must be able to grasp the meaning of any piece of writing addressed to the general
reader. All citizens should be able, for instance, to read newspapers of substance..” (1987: 12)
• Danger is that curriculum becomes reactionary and stayed
• Knowledge may become boiled down to information e.g. knowledge organisers, lists of knowledge to
be covered. In Hirsch (1987) there is ‘The List’ of knowledge which Americans need to be able to
share.

4. • Michael Young. British sociologist of education. Development of the idea of ‘powerful knowledge’. Defined
as:
“It is to enable all students to acquire knowledge that takes them beyond their experience. It is knowledge
which many will not have access to at home, among their friends, or in the communities in which they live. As
such, access to this knowledge is the ‘right’ of all pupils as future citizens.’ (Young, 2014:10 emphasis in
original)
• School knowledge is made distinct from everyday knowledge
• Knowledge becomes defined by disciplinary specialists and should be beyond personal experience. This
emergence of a disciplinary core of important knowledge is underpinned through ‘social realism’,
“these writers (Durkheim, Collins, Alexander, Bernstein) argue that it is the social nature of knowledge that in
part provides the grounds for its objectivity and its claims to truth.” (Young, 2008)
• Can geographical knowledge be divorced from experience and the everyday (See Lefebvre for the power
of the everyday!) in a meaningful way?
• What does this perspective add to issues of internal coherence, emergence and relations to other
disciplines?

5. GCSE Geography
OCR A
 Landscapes of the UK
 People of the UK
 UK environmental challenges
 Ecosystems of the planet
 People of the planet
 Environmental threats to the
planet
 Geographical skills
 Fieldwork assessment
OCR B
 Global hazards
 Changing climate
 Distinctive landscapes
 Sustaining ecosystems
 Urban futures
 Dynamic development
 UK in the 21st century
 Resource resilience
 Geographical skills
 Decision making exercise
EDEXCEL A
 Coasts
 Rivers
 Glaciation
 Weather hazards and climate
change
 Ecosystems, biodiversity &
management
 Changing cities
 Global development
 Resource management
 Fieldwork skills
 UK challenges
EDEXCEL B
Hazardous earth
Development dynamics
Challenges of an urbanising world
UK’s evolving physical landscapes
(coasts & rivers)
UK’s evolving human landscapes
(dynamic UK cities)
Geographical investigations
People and the biosphere
Forests under threat
Consuming energy resources
Making geographical decisions
AQA
Challenge of natural hazards
Living world
Physical landscapes in the UK
Urban issues and challenges
Changing economic world
Challenge of resource management
Issue evaluation
Fieldwork and skills
A-Level Geography
OCR
 Landscape systems
 Earth’s life support systems
 Changing spaces, making places
 Global connections
 Climate change*
 Disease dilemmas*
 Exploring oceans*
 Future of food*
 Hazardous earth*
 Geographical skills
 Independent investigation
(* - study 2 from 5)
EDEXCEL
 Tectonic processes and hazards
 Landscape systems, processes and change (inc. glacial
or coasts)
 Water cycle and water insecurity
 Carbon cycle and energy security
 Globalisation
 Shaping places (inc regenerating places or diverse
places)
 Superpowers
 Global development and connections (inc health and
human rights or migration and identity)
 Synoptic investigation
 Independent investigation
AQA
 Water and carbon cycles
 Hot desert systems and landscapes
 Coastal systems and landscapes
 Glacial systems and landscapes
 Hazards
 Ecosystems under stress
 Global systems and global governance
 Changing places
 Contemporary urban environments
 Population and the environment
 Resource security
 Fieldwork investigation
 Geographical skills
Is this new curriculum more reflective of disciplinary expertise and knowledge?

6. Some of the Problems for Geographical Education
• The most recent curricula at 14-19 age level (GCSE and A-level) have started to change – but minimally
• Are the syllabi driven explicitly by conceptual understanding or by ‘core knowledge’?
• To what degree is there an attempt to synthesise and create holistic schema to aid understanding of
earth systems? Or are we still asking students to memorise content as part of an atomistic process
• Does this allow students to develop a ‘geographical imagination’?
• What is the role of personal experience in helping to contextualise and understand the world? If we
pursue a powerful knowledge agenda?

7. Plexus Education – an Alternative Approach
• A working definition of a Plexus approach to Education is:
An approach to education which focuses on the interconnections between issues, ideas, theories and
methodologies to build more holistic and complex networks of educational understanding. An approach
which explores connecting processes and builds multidimensional perspectives.
• This means that the geography curriculum needs to be considered as a networked whole. How do
different elements of a programme talk to each other? What is the nature of the connections and how
do we understand them?
• Some basic interconnections we need to foster
Disciplinary Knowledge Experience
Human Geography Physical Geography
Global Local

8. Creating a Basis for Interconnections
• Need a core conceptual framework around which a holistic view can coalesce which is also disciplinary
in nature:
1. Climate change: Major processes driving and impacting across systems
2. Anthropocene: The interconnections between humans and their environments
3. Earth systems: An ability to understand how interconnected systems create planetary processes and
reactions to human activity
4. Complexity thinking: the basis for considering the interactions across all scales from the (sub-)
individual to the global
• May not change the content in the courses, but radical shift in the way that content is encountered,
questioned and understood.

9. Conceptualisations for a Plexus Structure
Critical physical geography is a new field that
combines critical attention to relations of
social power with deep knowledge of a
particular field of biophysical science or
technology in the service of social and
environmental transformation. The central
precept of critical physical geography is that
we cannot rely on explanations grounded in
physical or critical human geography alone
because physical landscapes and social
systems are as much the product of unequal
power relations, histories of colonialism, and
racial and gender disparities as they are of
hydrology, ecology, and climate change.
Critical physical geography is thus based in
the careful integrative work necessary to
render these deep interconnections between
biophysical and social systems legible.Kate Raworth https://inews.co.uk/news/long-
reads/doughnut-economics-kate-raworth-budget-spring-
statement-2018/
Critical Zone Observatories
http://criticalzone.org/national/research
/the-critical-zone-1national/ Rebecca Lave et al
http://www.criticalphysicalgeography.com/sample-page/

10. A First Conceptual Iteration for a Plexus Geography
Holistic Disciplinary
Knowledge
Conceptual
frameworks for
holistic
understanding
Experience and
reflection
Climate Change &
the Anthropocene
Geographical
Imagination
“To be truly literate, citizens
must be able to grasp the
meaning of any piece of
writing addressed to the
general reader. All citizens
should be able, for instance, to
read newspapers of
substance..” (Hirsch)
“It is to enable all students to
acquire knowledge that takes
them beyond their experience. It
is knowledge which many will
not have access to at home,
among their friends, or in the
communities in which they live.
As such, access to this knowledge
is the ‘right’ of all pupils as
future citizens.’ (Young)

11. Moving Plexus Beyond Geography
• Academic subjects structures serve a purpose for creating a coherent educational knowledge base
• They are artificial constructs and therefore students need to gain a more holistic perspective
• Begin to understand the ‘local’ nature of subject knowledge
• Begin to explore some of the interconnections between subjects where relevant
• See the curriculum as subject based – but with interconnective perspectives to begin to build the
understanding of the nature of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary studies before making the
transition into universities.
• One way in which this might be exemplified is through the conceptual holism of climate change and the
anthropocene