A Call to View Disciplinary Knowledge Through the Lens of Geography Teachers’ Professional Practice

Abstract

Understanding the ways knowledge is created, tested and evaluated within geography remains an underdeveloped area of geography education. This knowledge is included within the Maude’s typology of powerful geographical knowledge and is recognised within the description of powerful disciplinary knowledge that has culminated from the GeoCapabilities project. This chapter presents a call to view disciplinary knowledge through the lens of geography teachers’ professional practice. This exploration is orientated towards the idea that disciplinary knowledge ought not be isolated from how it is developed and marshalled by geography teachers, because it is through teachers’ professional practice that disciplinary knowledge becomes part of students’ geographical education. This chapter considers Huckle’s (Intl Res Geograph Environ Educ 28(1):70–84, 2019) concern that powerful geographical knowledge is not fully underpinned by critical realism and through this discussion draws out the significance of considering the epistemic relations of geographical knowledge for geography teachers’ curricular decision-making. The second part of the chapter builds the case for a more explicit theorisation of disciplinary knowledge, which attends to the interplay between the relations of teacher, student and content and more broadly to geography teachers’ professional practice.