Teaching Geography in Secondary Schools forms part of a series of readers designed to accompany the new Open University flexible PGCE course. It, and its partner book, Aspects of Teaching Secondary Geography: Perspectives on practice, will be the set books on the secondary geography course, as will the two generic readers Teaching, Learning and the Curriculum in Secondary Schools and Aspects of Teaching and Learning in Secondary Schools, and one further recent publication - Learning to Teach Geography in the Secondary School by David Lambert and David Balderstone. Together this set of books will provide the core academic text-based materials for the new geography course. They will be fully integrated with the web-based study modules and other web-based resources, and will also be integrated into the blocks of school experience undertaken by the students. School-based activities will use the texts as a platform, and the electronic conferencing environment in which the students will work will draw heavily on the texts as a resource.
The aim of this particular book, as its title suggests, is to bring together a wide range of articles and extracts, some new, but most from existing publications, that discuss the key ideas, debates and issues in geography education today. Students will be challenged to reflect critically on these issues in order to develop their own understanding of the complexity of many of the issues, and to consider the implications for their classroom practice. Most of the chapters include reference lists so that individual concerns and personal interests can be followed up in more detail.
The book is divided into four sections. The first puts the development of geography as a school subject into a historical perspective. It identifies the influences on and changes in the geography curriculum through the last century; it looks particularly closely at developments within the last decade; and sets out ideas about what we might want to see in the geography curriculum of the future.
The second section looks at some of the issues connected to the teaching and learning of geography in (and out of) the classroom. It provides an informed background to these issues so that beginning teachers can set their own classroom experiences into context and can start to develop their own ideas on how the issues might be addressed. A range of broader concerns - issues for geography in the twenty-first century - are featured in section three. As in all the sections, restrictions on the length of the book have meant that only a limited number of issues facing geography education could be selected for discussion here. We hope that the