🌍Frontier | Capabilities approach, curriculum making and PDK

Just for fun and those who want to read more.

Annuals of the Association of American Geographers published GeoCapabilities research in 2015. The article has three authors who are coordinators of the project. And as a research assistant, I attended the project meetings to discuss about the article as well as the multilingual website building. That is why this column is to talk about the project from the article and the website.

Geocapabilities project is regarded by IGU-CGE chairman as a representation of international collaborative research future.This article provides the theoretical underpinnings for an innovative international collaborative project in the field of geography education named GeoCapabilities. The project attempts to respond in new ways to enduring challenges facing geography teachers in schools.

These include the need to find convincing expression of geography’s contribution to the education of all young people and coping with the apparent divergence of geography in educational settings and its highly disparate expression as a research discipline in university departments. The project also hopes to contribute to the development of a framework for communicating the aims and purposes of geography in schools internationally, because here, too, there is great variety in definitions of national standards and even of disciplinary allegiances (including, e.g., the social studies, humanities, and biological sciences).

GeoCapabilities does not seek to flatten such divergences, for one of geography’s great strengths is its breadth. The long-term goal is to establish a secure platform for the international develop- ment of teachers’ capacities as creative and disciplined innovators. The project encourages teachers to think beyond program delivery and implementation and to embrace their role as the curriculum makers.

This column won't go too long, so we start by three key words:

capabillities approach,

curriculum making,

powerful disciplinary knowledge.

The three key terms are underpinning the theoretical building of the project, and all togther serves for the purpose of GeoCapabilities.

In GeoCapabilities, nurturing human potential includes the ability to think and reason in specialist ways – with geographical knowledge and ideas.GeoCapabilities clarifies the role that geographical knowledge and geographical thinking plays in the development of an educated person. This is a person with the capability to deliberate about the world from a disciplined perspective. Geographical knowledge helps us understand the world beyond our everyday experience of it.

This is why 'capabilities’ are different from generic competencies and transferable skills such as teamwork, communication, and planning. Like Amartya Sen, we do not wish to identify a list of 'capabilities’ to be measured or assessed. Thinking geographically (or scientifically, or historically, or artistically …) cannot be reduced to a tick list. But using geographical ideas and perspectives help us see the world in new ways. It provides particular, powerful insights. This contributes to human capabilities development because it enables sharper, critical reflection about the choices and decisions that govern one’s life.

1 Capabilities approach

The Capabilities Approach comes from Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum’s theory of human welfare economics. This sees human development as a process of enabling personal autonomy and freedom, both in thought and action.When applied to education, the theory concerns human potential in terms of freedoms 'to be’ and 'to do’. At a basic level this means being able to read and write. Researchers use the capabilities approach to demonstrate the loss of human potential when, for example, women and girls are denied access to basic education.

2 Curriculum Making

Curriculum making is the practical manifestation of curriculum thinking. One distinctive aspect of curriculum thinking is the appreciation of 'aims’ or 'goals’. So, unlike lesson planning which is often steered by specific learning objectives and learning activities, curriculum making is concerned with longer term goals. It is more strategic than lesson planning. Over a course of study, the teacher enacts the curriculum in order to enable students to think geographically.

Curriculum making is, therefore, a professional 'balancing act’. The teacher needs to balance several competing priorities:  the needs and interests of the students; the purposes and particular characteristics of the subject; general educational priorities; broader social purposes of school such as education for citizenship, healthy lifestyles. Curriculum making is a construct from the Anglo-Saxon tradition of curriculum studies.

3 Powerful Disciplinary Knowledge

PDK is a form of knowledge, often abstract and theoretical, that enables a person to understand, interpret, and think about the world. It draws in ideas and concepts derived from academic disciplines. Specialist teachers, such as geography teachers, provide students with opportunities to learn how to use geographical knowledge to think, to explain, to predict and to envision alternative futures. Because of its specialized, conceptual, and often contested nature, PDK usually has to be taught by skilful and knowledgeable teachers, and is therefore unlikely to be learned informally by happenstance and everyday experience.

Project partners are all invited illustrate PDK. This article use a climate change case vignette from Geographer Professor Doreen Massey's research.

Most climate scientists agree that greenhouse gas in the form of carbon dioxide emissions is a key cause of global climate change – but where does the responsibility lie for cutting carbon emissions?Consider the chart displayed below in Figure 1. The chart indicates that some countries, including the U.S. and India, contribute a large share of global emissions stemming from energy consumption within their borders. Energy consumption in other countries, such as the U.K., emits much less carbon into the atmosphere.

On the surface, it seems obvious which governments should bear a larger responsibility for reducing their internal emissions. In this regard, some countries, including the U.K., have claimed substantial progress in cutting emissions. However, this ignores a deeper geographical reality. The idea of global interdependence exposes the limitations of assigning responsibility to individual nations on the basis of energy consumption within national borders. Such calculations miss the effect of traded goods and manufacturing activities of multinational corporations operating outside of their home country. For example, the U.S. imports manufactured products from China, but the carbon emissions come from plants located within China’s borders. Companies which are incorporated in the U.K. have branches which operate – and pollute – in India. What does this knowledge suggest as to who should be responsible for carbon reduction?

As this PDK vignette about climate shows, people could easily read the 'bald facts’ presented on Figure 1 and reasonably decide who are the 'good guys’ and who are the 'bad guys’ when it comes to assigning responsibility for global greenhouse gas emissions. However this is an incomplete understanding because it does not account for the economic relationships connecting different nations. Geographic knowledge of the global economy is necessary to reach an accurate understanding of the data displayed in Figure 1. It is not difficult to imagine the implications of geographic ignorance on a mass scale for climate policy. Without geographic knowledge of the global economy, people tend to base their decisions on their immediate and everyday experiences (e.g., saving energy by buying efficient light bulbs). Geography education, on the other hand, provides a framework that enables people to think beyond their everyday experience and weigh decisions about how to assign responsibility for reducing emissions on a global scale based on how countries are interrelated and how they operate interdependently in a global economic context.