Futuring geography’s pluralist pedagogy

Abstract

The future of geography has to accommodate a constraint: academia's intellectual responsibility for school geography. This constraint can be utilized creatively, as it invites definitions of geography that grasp the bigger picture and accommodate difference, while also integrating prior conceptions of the discipline. This essay imagines a future where the resulting synthesis of ‘geography as an open pluralist pedagogy’ has potential far beyond schools to carry the discipline forward.

Introduction

It is a straightforward argument that geographical understanding is paramount to tackle the twenty-first century's pressing problems. Whether one discusses climate change, environmental degradation, social inequality, the global economy, geospatial technologies, or geopolitics: everything is geographical (Murphy, 2018; Sheppard, 2022).

One could say that such momentum for geography would be balm for a discipline that has trouble shaking off its existential anxiety. Geography routinely engages in soul searching interactions questioning its own future (Johnston, 1985, 1993; Liu et al., 2022; Sheppard; 2022; Thrift, 2002). These ‘future of geography debates’ result from repeated observations that the whole of academic geography amounts to less than the sum of its parts (Clifford, 2002; Liu et al., 2022). Instead of the synthesis that geography purports to make, scholars retreat into subdisciplinary silos with like-minded scholars (Sheppard, 2022). Moreover, there is a recurring feeling, as old as academic geography (Fenneman, 1919), that other academic fields encroach on geography's subject matter, expecially when geographical topics are in the public spotlight (Derudder and Van Meeteren, 2018).

Yet, there is one aspect of geography that is the envy of many younger disciplines: geography is a school subject. The necessity to care for a school curriculum and pedagogy (Fargher et al., 2021) is one sturdy source of institutional anchoring protecting geography's future. Inspriring a school curriculum is not just a privilege for academic geography, it is a duty. The young minds in classrooms today will be those bearing the brunt of the geographical catastrophes rapidly approaching us. They need to be provided the powerful knowledge (Béneker and Van der Vaart, 2021; Maude, 2017) helping them to navigate turbulence ahead. Academic geographers are obliged to make the discipline more than the sum of its parts, even if it is just for those young minds. The importance of geography as a school subject varies from country to country, as well as the closeness of the relation between academic geography and school geography (Gerber, 2001). This commentary imagines a disciplinary future where responsibility for geographical education is leveraged as a creative constraint to overcome geography's silofication without resorting to a disciplinary monism. Contexts that have a strong bond between school and academic geography are thus encouraged to cherish this connection. Contexts that do not have such a bond or where this bond was loosened recently may be inspired to strengthen it.

The paradox of the geographic subject

Geography's entropic tendency is underpinned by a fundamental paradox. As several scholars (e.g. Holt-Jensen, 2018; Kirk, 1963) have argued, geography has no material object of its own: our concerns for individuals, societies, the planet, and their interaction have never been the exclusive domain of geographers and we have always overlapped with other disciplines. Moreover, the logic of academic practice results in deepening divisions of labour that parcel geography's claimed material objects into narrowly demarcated research pursuits. This specialization ultimately drives the formation of new disciplines (Jacobs, 2013), and indeed geography has been a mother or midwife of many, including geology, meteorology, cartography, sociology and the environmental sciences (Van Meeteren and Sidaway, 2020).

But simultaneously, humans are ‘homo geographicus’ (Sack, 1997). Humans are continuously ‘writing the earth’, not just as describers and explainers, but also as world makers: their material and symbolic interactions are continuously inscribed in the world itself. The paradox of the geographic subject is that while ‘big G’ academic geography is continuously at risk of falling apart, ‘small g’ geographic practice is innate in human existence (Castree et al., 2008). It is this ‘geographic point of view’, or the tendency to ‘think geographically’, that is the formal object of the geographical discipline (cf. Sheppard, 2015).

This does not mean that academic geography has a birthright to exist, but as long as we successfully make the case that thinking geographically merits academic attention, the future of the discipline is more easily secured (Johnston, 1993). It is in pedagogy where we can most fruitfully make our mark to shape the public's thinking about the world and its current predicament (Castree, 2013). The crafting of a coherent curriculum, through recontextualizing academic geographic insight for educational purposes (Fargher et al., 2021), requires geographers to leave their silos and join-up their findings in a larger synthesis.

Thinking geographically

When thinking geographically includes the impact that human sense-making has on the world, geography is by definition, but not exclusively, a social science. Environmental concerns are a social science once they relate to human action (Bulkeley, 2019) and as geography is about writing and imagination, it also relates to the humanities (Dear, 2015). Although geography has always awkwardly bridged this main subdivision in the scientific division of labour (Driver, 1993), and this has long been a source of disciplinary fragmentation, the cultural turn has in fact strengthened the case for geography. We now realize that all academic subject boundaries are socially constructed and hence subject to continuous de- and reconstruction (Driver, 1993; Springer, 2017). If geography did not already exist, academia would be inventing it right now as an ambitious interdisciplinary field (Baerwald, 2010).

In that spirit, the key point of thinking (and acting) geographically is that it brings elements from highly divergent epistemological traditions into dialogue to make sense of the world (Van Meeteren et al., 2016). Disciplinary geography combines interdisciplinary knowledges to answer geographical questions (Baerwald, 2010). What to include to answer these questions is context-specific, but there is no a priori exclusion of the knowledge that can be brought to bear on the geographic project and may include all the unexpected, emancipatory, and transformative voices thinkable (Springer, 2017).

The constraints and possibilities of school curricula

School subjects are slowly-changing institutions. And for many good reasons: the material investments at scale (teaching materials, textbooks, pedagogical training) have huge sunk costs, and the stakes – the education of the next generation – are large. One would not want to follow every turn in academic geographical debate before it has proven to be durably significant. In our world of interdisciplinary challenges, disciplines are often perceived as conservative vestiges that gatekeep knowledge and enforce stifling norms (Jacobs, 2013). But ‘discipline’ is also a key pedagogical term: denoting an established body of knowledge and the instructions to disciples (learners) (Turner, 2006). If any geographical curriculum is to make disciplinary sense, it needs to relate to its historical predecessors, albeit with a view towards geographical challenges in the future and acknowledging changing geographical insights and technologies.

When discussing the geography curriculum in all its geo-historical variety, Pattison's (1990 [1964]) overview, created for the AAG's 1960s ‘high school geography project’, remains an important foundation. Pattison argues that there are four distinct geographical traditions competing to be the centerpiece of the discipline: 1) the spatial tradition covering the spatial-analytic and spatial-conceptual dimensions of geography; 2) the area studies and regional geography tradition; 3) the human-environment relationship tradition; 4) the earth science tradition. Arguments continue to regularly appear advocating for one of these traditions to be the discipline's future (e.g. Larsen et al., 2021; Liu et al., 2022). However, following Pattison's pluralism, the four traditions all need to be regarded as different combinations of concepts, theories and knowledge brought together within geography's purview. The traditions relate to each other through family resemblance (Puttick and Cullinane, 2022). They all share several characteristics associated with geography while not having a single common denominator that makes them ‘geographical’. This does not mean, however, that sharing a disciplinary space makes them automatically interoperable. These traditions have branched out over long lineages, and individual branches are independently in continuous dialogue with neighboring disciplines, sometimes with little desire to report back to the mother discipline (Clifford, 2002; Thrift, 2002). Cumulatively, this means that the distance between the outer disciplinary branches may be large and require extensive intradisciplinary dialogue to be overcome (Domosh, 2016). Yet all four traditions combine to form chords in the vocabularies of thinking geographically, all play a role in humanity's current predicament, and all have historically been treated in school geography curricula over the world (Gerber, 2001). A future-proof geography curriculum and a dynamic academic discipline both require continuous remixing and recontextualizing of knowledge emerging from these four traditions in different times and places.

Conclusion: Creative constraints

The need to nurture geography as a school subject puts a constraint on the future of the academic discipline. But the benefit of this constraint is that it helps focusing our effort. The academic and school subjects have a lot to gain from one another while drifting (further) apart benefits neither (Stannard, 2003; Warf, 1999). The paradox of geography makes clear that striving for demarcating our own material object is futile, but that we have to cultivate our capacity to bring knowledge together on the basis that humans are inherently geographical. Thinking geographically with changing configurations of knowledge is what makes geography more than the sum of its subdisciplinary parts. That larger perspective teaches students to become more effective, emancipatory, empathic and critical geographical thinkers equipped for the massive challenges of the twenty-first century. What more exciting, but daunting and somewhat scary, future could an academic discipline wish for?