After living and working in the Middle East, I have decided to move back to the UK and focus my time researching the representation and distortion of the world as seen in school geography. This brief paper lays out the proposed research context, approach and methods to be used for the PhD qualification.
This proposal is likely to change as the research evolves. If this is of interest please contact me at [email protected]
1 IntroductionNational curricula are being challenged and transformed by both the impact of increasing global interdependence, European integration and migration-related cultural diversity. The deindustrialization of the advanced economies of the European Union and the rapid emergence of a ‘knowledge society’ (Giovannini, 2007) has meant that education has never been so important. The role of schools is not only to successfully educate our young people, but also to produce skilled, innovative, workers, who have greater freedoms to travel for work in other member states of the European Union and beyond. This research will examine the representation and distortion of the global, European and multicultural dimensions of school geography in England, comparing schools in at least two multi-cultural cities. Leicester is ideal, as it is a city with 329,600 residents (according to official census data), of which only 45 per cent are a white British population (ONS 2012); it has, at 28 per cent, the highest proportion of Asian or British Asian Indians anywhere in England. In Birmingham, 22 per cent of1,073,045 residents were born abroad in places as diverse as India, Ireland, Jamaica and Bangladesh (ibid.).
The most recent European enlargement in 2004 and 2007 increased the number of member countries of the European Union to 28; eleven of which are former Soviet State accession countries. By July 2012, more than one million people born in Eastern Europe were resident in England (ONS, 2012), making up three per cent of the total population in Leicester and numbering 16,532 in Birmingham (ibid.). This recent migration flow opens up a new opportunity to carry out research focused on young peoples’ conceptions of the global, European and multicultural dimensions of school geography of which there is currently a lack of research (Bourn and Hunt, 2011; Marshall, 2007). Child migrants are not a homogeneous group; they are a group of individuals with unique stories. Some children migrate to England when their parents get economic or educational opportunities. Some children are being reunited with family and others travel as asylum seekers moving away from family and dangerous places. It seems that the one million children in English state schools who speak English as a second language (ONS, 2013) are often overlooked in migration studies as research has tended to focus on the mobile adults (Gardner, 2012). With the emergence of focused research into childhood and young peoples’ geographies (Holloway and Valentine, 2000; Hopkins, 2010), children’s world awareness, knowledge and values (Hicks, 2005; Palmer and Birch, 2004) and with significant activity in many schools on learning about global and European issues (Carter and Clarke, 2010), now an ideal time to conduct educational research focused on the representation and distortion of the world and multicultural dimension of school geography in England.
1.1 Preliminary Objectives
This research will explore several interrelated themes, reflected in the three empirical sections; whilst these will require further refinement; at this initial stage, they are as follows:
2 The Research Context
This research proposal builds on my MA dissertation focusing on students’ conceptions of geography, an international education comparison MA essay and a personal interest in young peoples’ sense of place.
2.1 European integration
Today, the European Union (EU) is a major trading power with 28 member states and a goods and services GDP of €12 945 402 million, accounting for around 16 per cent of global imports and exports. This is impressive considering it has only seven per cent of the global population (Eurostat, 2012). The political and economic turmoil as a consequence of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the establishment and enlargement of the European Union and the Single Market in 1993; with the ‘four freedoms’ of movement, of goods, services, people and money; encouraged a continuous wave of migration from east to west. The strong desire for Eastern Europeans to experience life abroad combined with a sense of being ‘forced’ to leave localities, ‘where the transition to a market economy has resulted in a contraction of employment opportunities’ (White, 2010, p.565) has resulted in more than one million people born in Eastern Europe becoming resident in England, as of July 2012 (ONS, 2013). On 1 January 2014, the temporary job restrictions in place for the last seven years for Romanian and Bulgarian nationals has been dropped. The expectation of a ‘flood’ of migrants, as headlined by the rightwing British press (Henley, 2013), is unlikely to become reality. However, the media coverage has initiated debate, with David Cameron and the coalition government responding by tightening migration benefit rules. Critics of such rushed policy include Danny Alexander, the Liberal Democrat cabinet minister, who has accused senior Tories of ‘pandering’ to anti-European sentiment (Graham, 2013). A decade ago, Scoffham wrote in the book Issues in Geography Teaching that the British ‘are ambivalent in our attitude towards Europe’ (2000, p219). Seemingly, the fault lines that were there at the dawn of the new Millennium are widening, with the current negative political and media reactions (Henley, 2013).
2.2 Students’ conceptions of the European, national and multicultural dimensions of school geography and their global sense of place
Since the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, the EU itself has emphasized that the process of European integration should not just be seen as the result of an intergovernmental institution building process, but embedded in the process of education and developed by its citizens (Painter 1998). The British Geography National Curriculum was first published in 1991 and has subsequently been transformed by successive governments in content, structure and political stance (Walford, 2001; Rawling, 2001). It has been shown that not all education systems in Europe provide the same kind of information about the EU (Georgi, 2008; Philippou et al., 2009), even if they did, in practice there is often a gap between the formal curriculum and what is actually learnt in the classroom (Kelley 2009). The ‘formal curriculum’ is all that should be taught, the officially prescribed curriculum (Goodlad, 1977). This often differs from the ‘enacted curriculum’ as experienced by both pupils and teachers, which is what actually takes place in a classroom (Eisner 1985). Even though ‘teachers are expected to follow the formal curricula, empirical research has convincingly shown that not all of them actually do so’ (Verhaegen et al., 2013, p.839), even if they did, it is a well-established idea that children do not always learn what we teach (Black and Wiliam, 1998). A useful framework for the research is outlined by Hicks (2007) who sees the Global Dimension in terms of four linked dimensions: issues, spatial, temporal and process; rather than around global citizenship, sustainable development, conflict resolution, values and perceptions, diversity, human rights, social justice, and interdependence; the eight concepts constructed as the Global Dimension by the Department for Education and Skills (2000; 2005). Hicks outlines a minimum requirement for students to study relevant contemporary global issues, that are spatially related and connected over time, with ‘pedagogy that is most appropriate for investigating such matters’ (Hicks, 2007, p26), thus avoiding a case-study approach to the global dimension, where some places are stereotyped and marginalized (Roberts, 2013). Education authorities have various control instruments at their disposal to ascertain whether schools and teachers actually follow the rules (Benavot and Resh 2001), but the easiest method is to ask the students directly.
Young people’s lives have been firmly on the geographical agenda, since the publication of Skelton and Valentine’s Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures (1998), which emphasised the potential for young people to inform wider geographical debates (Hopkins, 2010). Providing opportunities to listen to young people’s perspectives is now more embedded in education policy since the publication of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child Article 12 and 13 (UN, 1989) and the UK Children Act (DfES, 1989). If, in a rapidly changing knowledge society interconnections are to become more complex as technology advances and if we see education as having a role to play in enabling young people to play a successful role as global citizens, then it would be sensible to not only listen to young people’s views and conceptions (Dowgill, 1998; Biddulph and Adey, 2003; Hopwood, 2009) but to integrate young peoples ideas into the curriculum-making process (Hopkins, 2010) and engaging young people in the process (Biddulph, 2011).
A young person’s global sense of place describes the feeling a person links to a place already visited (Massey, 1993). The significance young people attach to particular local places may be further influenced by feelings of belonging or alienation, the feeling of being an ‘insider’ or an ‘outsider’ (Relph, 1976), feelings of history and tradition or of novelty and unfamiliarity and an individual’s ‘rootedness’ (Tuan, 1974). Drawing on this theoretical framework, I will examine some of the processes that are shaping young peoples’ global and European sense of place, specifically their place identity.
3 The contribution this research will make to the field of education
The key outcome of this research will be a better understanding of how the process of migration impacts on young people living in multicultural areas, their sense of place and level of understanding and respect for other places, people, cultures, values and beliefs.
The potential impact on professional practice will be real information about students’ views of the European, national and multicultural dimensions of school geography. When students reflect on their own perceptions of other people and better understand the factors that influence their own national and European identity, they can better avoid ethnocentric stereotyping and prejudice in education. As Roberts (2013, p.68) points out ‘Students get to know the world partly through what is presented to them in school geography so we need to be critically aware of how we represent it’.
4 Research methodology and methods
Michael Crotty (2003) in his book The Foundations of Social Research frames the research process using the four basic elements: epistemology, theoretical perspective, methodology and methods. The philosophical stance shapes not only the research strategy but also informs the methodology and the procedures that follow (Saunders et al., 2009).
4.1 Epistemology and the Theoretical Perspective
Research is the systematic, controlled, empirical and critical investigation of hypothetical propositions, about the presumed relations among natural phenomena (Kerlinger, 1970). Hitchcock and Hughes (1995) suggest that the assumptions we form about the nature of reality (ontology) give rise to epistemological assumptions, or ways of researching into the nature of reality. Following the paradigmatic shift, termed the New Social Studies of Childhood by James and Prout (1997), it is worth remembering that the views of young people are worthy of study; there are a multiplicity of childhoods and these views have been actively and socially constructed. Students’ conceptions of global, European and national identity are therefore constructed with others, classrooms and homes being two of many contexts for this construction. Associated to the more modern interpretivist approach, this research will, in essence, seek ‘verstehen’ or deep understanding (Giddens and Turner, 1997) of different students’ conceptions of the European, national and multicultural dimensions of school geography. This can be attributed to a social constructivist epistemology, such that there is not a universal truth to discover, but rather an intention to examine social attitudes, experiences and understandings (Flick, 2004). Constructivist theory sets out that we learn about the world by actively ‘making sense of it for ourselves’ (Roberts, 2013, p.70), new knowledge collected in this research will be integrated with existing knowledge and can therefore be defined as theory building. The fact that individuals’ own beliefs and attitudes are being studied, raises the consideration that human-beings are individualistic and unpredictable, thus the focus of this study is to seek meaning, not facts (Cohen et al., 2011).
4.2 Methodological approachIn line with the philosophical stance, the research will aim to engage with participants in order to explore their perceptions and understanding (Cohen et al., 2011 Such a methodological approach is considered to be phenomenological research insofar as it considers the ideas and experiences of humans (Saldaña, 2011) and attributes subjective meanings to these social phenomena following the ideas of Max Weber (Macionis and Gerber, 2010).
4.3 Research MethodsA mixed-method approach will be selected given the de-centralized, national nature of geography curriculum development within England. A significant section of this research will use the Policy Cycle Approach (Bowe, Ball and Gold, 1992) as a framework to trace the sequence of ethnocentrism and Europeanism found in policy text production for the European, national and multicultural dimensions of European and national educational policy. Primary data used to inform this research will follow a range of data collection methodologies to investigate the following:
Semi-structured interviews will then take place with a small sample of the students who took part in the previous survey, developing narratives of their personal conceptions, to better understand the shape of the world and level of global citizenship and European identity felt by students. This can be expressed as their sense of belonging of the EU (Risse 2010), revealing the multiplicity of imaginations (Massey 2005) students have for ‘other’ places studied in school. During the data collection stage of this research, it is important that students, when asked about European and national identity, describe a wide range of aspects without being limited (Stodolsky and Grossman, 1995). Researchers should not be ‘prescriptive in predetermining what participants can talk or write about’ (Hopwood, 2009, p. 189). Driver et al. (1996), when discussing science as a subject, suggest that students’ ideas are often ‘personal and incoherent’ and will ‘draw on a range of characteristics in different contexts’ (p. 16). Data analysis will not assume structure or coherence to responses, but will rather look for similarities and recurring themes. Such participatory methodologies support the idea of pupil voice and bring students into the heart of research enquiries, placing the power in their hands to ‘analyze and transform their own lives’ (Cahill 2007, p.297).
References
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This proposal is likely to change as the research evolves. If this is of interest please contact me at [email protected]
1 IntroductionNational curricula are being challenged and transformed by both the impact of increasing global interdependence, European integration and migration-related cultural diversity. The deindustrialization of the advanced economies of the European Union and the rapid emergence of a ‘knowledge society’ (Giovannini, 2007) has meant that education has never been so important. The role of schools is not only to successfully educate our young people, but also to produce skilled, innovative, workers, who have greater freedoms to travel for work in other member states of the European Union and beyond. This research will examine the representation and distortion of the global, European and multicultural dimensions of school geography in England, comparing schools in at least two multi-cultural cities. Leicester is ideal, as it is a city with 329,600 residents (according to official census data), of which only 45 per cent are a white British population (ONS 2012); it has, at 28 per cent, the highest proportion of Asian or British Asian Indians anywhere in England. In Birmingham, 22 per cent of1,073,045 residents were born abroad in places as diverse as India, Ireland, Jamaica and Bangladesh (ibid.).
The most recent European enlargement in 2004 and 2007 increased the number of member countries of the European Union to 28; eleven of which are former Soviet State accession countries. By July 2012, more than one million people born in Eastern Europe were resident in England (ONS, 2012), making up three per cent of the total population in Leicester and numbering 16,532 in Birmingham (ibid.). This recent migration flow opens up a new opportunity to carry out research focused on young peoples’ conceptions of the global, European and multicultural dimensions of school geography of which there is currently a lack of research (Bourn and Hunt, 2011; Marshall, 2007). Child migrants are not a homogeneous group; they are a group of individuals with unique stories. Some children migrate to England when their parents get economic or educational opportunities. Some children are being reunited with family and others travel as asylum seekers moving away from family and dangerous places. It seems that the one million children in English state schools who speak English as a second language (ONS, 2013) are often overlooked in migration studies as research has tended to focus on the mobile adults (Gardner, 2012). With the emergence of focused research into childhood and young peoples’ geographies (Holloway and Valentine, 2000; Hopkins, 2010), children’s world awareness, knowledge and values (Hicks, 2005; Palmer and Birch, 2004) and with significant activity in many schools on learning about global and European issues (Carter and Clarke, 2010), now an ideal time to conduct educational research focused on the representation and distortion of the world and multicultural dimension of school geography in England.
1.1 Preliminary Objectives
This research will explore several interrelated themes, reflected in the three empirical sections; whilst these will require further refinement; at this initial stage, they are as follows:
- The changing shape of the world as written in successive versions of the Geography National Curriculum and European Union educational policy documents focusing on Global Learning and the European Dimension.
- The changing shape of the world as taught or enacted within school geography in England, focusing on the form of the learning and the impact it has on students and the extent to which the world is represented and distorted in key resources created to support successive versions of the curriculum.
- National and migrant students’ conceptions of the global, European and national dimension of school geography and their ‘sense of place’ (Relph, 1976) at different spatial scales from global to local.
2 The Research Context
This research proposal builds on my MA dissertation focusing on students’ conceptions of geography, an international education comparison MA essay and a personal interest in young peoples’ sense of place.
2.1 European integration
Today, the European Union (EU) is a major trading power with 28 member states and a goods and services GDP of €12 945 402 million, accounting for around 16 per cent of global imports and exports. This is impressive considering it has only seven per cent of the global population (Eurostat, 2012). The political and economic turmoil as a consequence of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the establishment and enlargement of the European Union and the Single Market in 1993; with the ‘four freedoms’ of movement, of goods, services, people and money; encouraged a continuous wave of migration from east to west. The strong desire for Eastern Europeans to experience life abroad combined with a sense of being ‘forced’ to leave localities, ‘where the transition to a market economy has resulted in a contraction of employment opportunities’ (White, 2010, p.565) has resulted in more than one million people born in Eastern Europe becoming resident in England, as of July 2012 (ONS, 2013). On 1 January 2014, the temporary job restrictions in place for the last seven years for Romanian and Bulgarian nationals has been dropped. The expectation of a ‘flood’ of migrants, as headlined by the rightwing British press (Henley, 2013), is unlikely to become reality. However, the media coverage has initiated debate, with David Cameron and the coalition government responding by tightening migration benefit rules. Critics of such rushed policy include Danny Alexander, the Liberal Democrat cabinet minister, who has accused senior Tories of ‘pandering’ to anti-European sentiment (Graham, 2013). A decade ago, Scoffham wrote in the book Issues in Geography Teaching that the British ‘are ambivalent in our attitude towards Europe’ (2000, p219). Seemingly, the fault lines that were there at the dawn of the new Millennium are widening, with the current negative political and media reactions (Henley, 2013).
2.2 Students’ conceptions of the European, national and multicultural dimensions of school geography and their global sense of place
Since the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, the EU itself has emphasized that the process of European integration should not just be seen as the result of an intergovernmental institution building process, but embedded in the process of education and developed by its citizens (Painter 1998). The British Geography National Curriculum was first published in 1991 and has subsequently been transformed by successive governments in content, structure and political stance (Walford, 2001; Rawling, 2001). It has been shown that not all education systems in Europe provide the same kind of information about the EU (Georgi, 2008; Philippou et al., 2009), even if they did, in practice there is often a gap between the formal curriculum and what is actually learnt in the classroom (Kelley 2009). The ‘formal curriculum’ is all that should be taught, the officially prescribed curriculum (Goodlad, 1977). This often differs from the ‘enacted curriculum’ as experienced by both pupils and teachers, which is what actually takes place in a classroom (Eisner 1985). Even though ‘teachers are expected to follow the formal curricula, empirical research has convincingly shown that not all of them actually do so’ (Verhaegen et al., 2013, p.839), even if they did, it is a well-established idea that children do not always learn what we teach (Black and Wiliam, 1998). A useful framework for the research is outlined by Hicks (2007) who sees the Global Dimension in terms of four linked dimensions: issues, spatial, temporal and process; rather than around global citizenship, sustainable development, conflict resolution, values and perceptions, diversity, human rights, social justice, and interdependence; the eight concepts constructed as the Global Dimension by the Department for Education and Skills (2000; 2005). Hicks outlines a minimum requirement for students to study relevant contemporary global issues, that are spatially related and connected over time, with ‘pedagogy that is most appropriate for investigating such matters’ (Hicks, 2007, p26), thus avoiding a case-study approach to the global dimension, where some places are stereotyped and marginalized (Roberts, 2013). Education authorities have various control instruments at their disposal to ascertain whether schools and teachers actually follow the rules (Benavot and Resh 2001), but the easiest method is to ask the students directly.
Young people’s lives have been firmly on the geographical agenda, since the publication of Skelton and Valentine’s Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures (1998), which emphasised the potential for young people to inform wider geographical debates (Hopkins, 2010). Providing opportunities to listen to young people’s perspectives is now more embedded in education policy since the publication of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child Article 12 and 13 (UN, 1989) and the UK Children Act (DfES, 1989). If, in a rapidly changing knowledge society interconnections are to become more complex as technology advances and if we see education as having a role to play in enabling young people to play a successful role as global citizens, then it would be sensible to not only listen to young people’s views and conceptions (Dowgill, 1998; Biddulph and Adey, 2003; Hopwood, 2009) but to integrate young peoples ideas into the curriculum-making process (Hopkins, 2010) and engaging young people in the process (Biddulph, 2011).
A young person’s global sense of place describes the feeling a person links to a place already visited (Massey, 1993). The significance young people attach to particular local places may be further influenced by feelings of belonging or alienation, the feeling of being an ‘insider’ or an ‘outsider’ (Relph, 1976), feelings of history and tradition or of novelty and unfamiliarity and an individual’s ‘rootedness’ (Tuan, 1974). Drawing on this theoretical framework, I will examine some of the processes that are shaping young peoples’ global and European sense of place, specifically their place identity.
3 The contribution this research will make to the field of education
The key outcome of this research will be a better understanding of how the process of migration impacts on young people living in multicultural areas, their sense of place and level of understanding and respect for other places, people, cultures, values and beliefs.
The potential impact on professional practice will be real information about students’ views of the European, national and multicultural dimensions of school geography. When students reflect on their own perceptions of other people and better understand the factors that influence their own national and European identity, they can better avoid ethnocentric stereotyping and prejudice in education. As Roberts (2013, p.68) points out ‘Students get to know the world partly through what is presented to them in school geography so we need to be critically aware of how we represent it’.
4 Research methodology and methods
Michael Crotty (2003) in his book The Foundations of Social Research frames the research process using the four basic elements: epistemology, theoretical perspective, methodology and methods. The philosophical stance shapes not only the research strategy but also informs the methodology and the procedures that follow (Saunders et al., 2009).
4.1 Epistemology and the Theoretical Perspective
Research is the systematic, controlled, empirical and critical investigation of hypothetical propositions, about the presumed relations among natural phenomena (Kerlinger, 1970). Hitchcock and Hughes (1995) suggest that the assumptions we form about the nature of reality (ontology) give rise to epistemological assumptions, or ways of researching into the nature of reality. Following the paradigmatic shift, termed the New Social Studies of Childhood by James and Prout (1997), it is worth remembering that the views of young people are worthy of study; there are a multiplicity of childhoods and these views have been actively and socially constructed. Students’ conceptions of global, European and national identity are therefore constructed with others, classrooms and homes being two of many contexts for this construction. Associated to the more modern interpretivist approach, this research will, in essence, seek ‘verstehen’ or deep understanding (Giddens and Turner, 1997) of different students’ conceptions of the European, national and multicultural dimensions of school geography. This can be attributed to a social constructivist epistemology, such that there is not a universal truth to discover, but rather an intention to examine social attitudes, experiences and understandings (Flick, 2004). Constructivist theory sets out that we learn about the world by actively ‘making sense of it for ourselves’ (Roberts, 2013, p.70), new knowledge collected in this research will be integrated with existing knowledge and can therefore be defined as theory building. The fact that individuals’ own beliefs and attitudes are being studied, raises the consideration that human-beings are individualistic and unpredictable, thus the focus of this study is to seek meaning, not facts (Cohen et al., 2011).
4.2 Methodological approachIn line with the philosophical stance, the research will aim to engage with participants in order to explore their perceptions and understanding (Cohen et al., 2011 Such a methodological approach is considered to be phenomenological research insofar as it considers the ideas and experiences of humans (Saldaña, 2011) and attributes subjective meanings to these social phenomena following the ideas of Max Weber (Macionis and Gerber, 2010).
4.3 Research MethodsA mixed-method approach will be selected given the de-centralized, national nature of geography curriculum development within England. A significant section of this research will use the Policy Cycle Approach (Bowe, Ball and Gold, 1992) as a framework to trace the sequence of ethnocentrism and Europeanism found in policy text production for the European, national and multicultural dimensions of European and national educational policy. Primary data used to inform this research will follow a range of data collection methodologies to investigate the following:
- The perceived size of the European Union will be obtained by asking students to construct a mind map of the European Union on a blank piece of paper, following research by Gould and White (1974), then label an outline map of Europe with the 28 members of the European Union.
- Student experiences of the European, national and multicultural dimensions of school geography, aimed at 13/14 year old students in their last final year of compulsory Geography education in the UK will be collected through a survey of closed and open questions, some knowledge based, some experience-based and others asking for opinions focused on global and European issues.
Semi-structured interviews will then take place with a small sample of the students who took part in the previous survey, developing narratives of their personal conceptions, to better understand the shape of the world and level of global citizenship and European identity felt by students. This can be expressed as their sense of belonging of the EU (Risse 2010), revealing the multiplicity of imaginations (Massey 2005) students have for ‘other’ places studied in school. During the data collection stage of this research, it is important that students, when asked about European and national identity, describe a wide range of aspects without being limited (Stodolsky and Grossman, 1995). Researchers should not be ‘prescriptive in predetermining what participants can talk or write about’ (Hopwood, 2009, p. 189). Driver et al. (1996), when discussing science as a subject, suggest that students’ ideas are often ‘personal and incoherent’ and will ‘draw on a range of characteristics in different contexts’ (p. 16). Data analysis will not assume structure or coherence to responses, but will rather look for similarities and recurring themes. Such participatory methodologies support the idea of pupil voice and bring students into the heart of research enquiries, placing the power in their hands to ‘analyze and transform their own lives’ (Cahill 2007, p.297).
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