Critical School Geography Education for Global Citizenship John Huckle
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Critical School Geography Education for global citizenship John Huckle Critical School Geography Education for Global Citizenship John Huckle Cover photo: Ben Gingell, Dreamtime.com Text copyright © John Huckle 2020 The moral right of the author has been asserted This ebook downloaded from the author’s website http://john.huckle.org.uk To my grandchildren Jessica and Oliver Contents Preface i Chapter one Introduction 1 Curriculum unit one Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution 37 and its impact on healthcare Chapter two Critical geography, critical 49 education Curriculum unit two Spatial divisions of schooling 79 Chapter three Students, teachers, and the 93 geography of happiness Curriculum unit Happiness and Equality: UK and 123 three Finland compared Chapter four Knowledge 137 Curriculum unit four Homelessness: causes and solutions 165 Chapter five Critical pedagogy 191 Curriculum unit five The future of work 221 Chapter six Nature 247 Curriculum unit six Urban farming in Chicago, Nairobi 277 and Bristol Chapter seven Space 289 Curriculum unit China’s Belt and Road Initiative 315 seven and its impacts on Xinjiang and East Africa Chapter eight Place 327 Curriculum unit Becoming a young British Muslim 361 eight woman: the significance of place Chapter nine Democracy and citizenship 385 Curriculum unit nine Paying for the transition to 419 sustainable development: the role of international tax reform Preface Over thirty five years ago in the concluding chapter of Geographical Education: Reflection and Action I wrote A genuinely socialist approach to geography in schools should stem from a recognition that education is a means of both reproducing and challenging existing social and human-environment relations. Geography lessons can not only sustain prevailing beliefs and attitudes but may also allow pupils and teachers to examine alternatives openly and critically. There is scope for committed work within schools and the current crisis of capitalism provides geography teachers with significant opportunities. They teach about industry, towns, developing countries, resources, pollution, and world trade and are therefore well placed to explore the mounting contradictions of a mode of economic and social organization based on inequality and exploitation. By dealing with unemployment, resource depletion, environmental deterioration, and the global economic order in a manner which acknowledges conflict and seeks political literacy, they are more likely to counter the apathy, indiscipline and truancy with which pupils currently register their discontent. Such work would represent an attempt to break the prevailing correspondence between schooling, culture and economy and requires politically aware geography teachers who recognize their role as agents of change. (1) p. 151 The crisis I mentioned in 1983 has not gone away. The turn to neoliberalism that was then just beginning, was an attempt to resolve it that ended in the financial crisis of 2008. By that time the economic, social and political geography of the UK had been transformed in the interests of a rich and powerful elite and schooling had been reformed to sweep away the progressive and radical ideas of the 1960s and 1970s. The decade from 2008 to 2019 was one of austerity when working people paid the price of bankers’ excesses; real wages and living standards stagnated; welfare benefits fell; and the quality of many urban and rural environments declined. The impacts of globalisation and austerity on ‘left behind’ places and communities led to the rise of right and left populism with the former contributing to the Brexit vote of 2016 and the Conservative’s election victories in 2017 and 2019. Corbyism offered a left I alternative that appealed to many young voters but it was defeated by strategy failures and a majority who considered it unrealistic and voted to ‘get Brexit done’. In 2020 coronavirus arrived confirming the unsustainable and unjust nature of contemporary capitalism and prompting debate on the ‘next normal’ or a more sustainable alternative. It was partly the prospect of a Corbyn government that led me to return to my earlier writing on socialist school geography in 2016. Another stimulus was the publication of Unesco guidance on education for sustainable development and global citizenship (ESDGC) and an associated publication on embedding this is school textbooks. My writing on ESDGC over four decades had convinced me that radical democracy is the key to sustainable development and that critical academic geographers and educators offer appropriate content and pedagogy (theory and practice) that can be adapted to embed ESDGC within the secondary school geography curriculum. This book sets out to demonstrate what critical school geography should involve and reflects the following considerations: Critical social theory offers ways of understanding how the world works and how global society might develop in more sustainable ways. It informs both critical academic geography and critical education and represents powerful knowledge which school students should consider in ways appropriate to their age, ability and interests. Critical pedagogy seeks to counter false understandings (ideology); help people understand the causes of oppression; and offer liberating social alternatives. Three forms of critical pedagogy are particularly significant for geography teachers: eco-pedagogy, the pedagogy of place, and post- colonial pedagogy. Relevance Teenagers face a troubled and fast changing world. They are worried about school, future jobs and housing, the environment, racial inequality and their mental health. The curriculum units in this book seek to address these concerns. II Curriculum making There is an urgent need for geography teachers to reclaim their professionalism and develop the curriculum in consultation with students and others. Internationalism There is value in geography teachers drawing on international guidance on ESDGC developed by Unesco and embedding this in the curriculum.. Open source By publishing this text as an ebook readers have ready access to many of the sources cited that are freely available on the internet. Membership of the Geographical Association (2) and access to its journals, Geography and Teaching Geography, is assumed. Professional development By providing both theory (the chapters) and practice (the curriculum units) together with many references and follow- up videos, this book acts as a vehicle for the professional development of geography teachers. The chapters in the book aim to provide teachers with a framework of critical ideas about political economy, nature, space, place, democracy and citizenship which should inform their curriculum making. The chapters on knowledge and pedagogy help them think about powerful knowledge and how it should be developed in ways that encourage critical thinking and foster democracy. The chapter on students, teachers, alienation and happiness, focuses on what encouraging happier students and happier geography teachers might involve. While chapter one introduces populist left ideas on radical democracy that underpin the book, some readers may prefer to also read chapter nine with its more thorough attention to theory before other chapters. The curriculum units are attempts to demonstrate what curriculum making should involve. Each takes one or more publications by critical academic geographers that are relevant to a key concern of teenagers, and develops its understandings into a sequence of lessons reflecting the framework of objectives and topics provided by Unesco’s guidance on ESDGC. Each unit will require revision to match it to students’ and teachers’ needs and will quickly date in terms of its content and relevance. The main purpose of these units is to show what is possible and to inspire teachers individually or in departments, to follow their example. III Radical democracy (3), the key theme running through the book, seeks to deepen and widen democracy as a means of redistributing wealth and power and thereby extending equality, liberty, solidarity and sustainability. Citizens should have powers to control the development of all aspects of society: the economy, politics, culture, and the environment, at all scales from the local to the global. This involves the reform of liberal democracies; the construction of a global accountable democracy; and the adoption of the principle of subsidiarity. Issues should be dealt with at the most immediate or local level that is consistent with their resolution, rebalancing representative and participatory democracy and encouraging such instruments as workers’ and consumers’ co-ops, worker share ownership, citizens’ assemblies, constitutional conventions, participatory budgeting, popular planning, community schools and publically owned media platforms all of which act as vehicles for citizenship education. Critical education draws on both agonistic and deliberative perspectives on radical democracy and the tensions between these are dealt with in chapters five and nine. Radical global democratisation requires global citizens who exercise responsibility across space, time and species, caring for others elsewhere in the world, others not yet born, and other species. Chapter nine suggests that it has wide reaching implications for political economy, global governance, international relations, and education for global citizenship. School geography has long promoted itself as a means of fostering international understanding and in its critical form explores