Challenging the Dominant Paradigm in the Geography National Curriculum: reconstructing place knowledge

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article argues that underpinning the National Curriculum Geography Order is a positivist, ethnocentric paradigm, the source of which can be traced to periods in the history of the subject. The purpose of the research described here was to enquire into the nature of this paradigm and to investigate the extent to which it can be challenged in the context of teaching and learning about place. In the National Curriculum Order, place study is given considerable status. The discourse about one ‘economically developing’ place, Kenya, is taken as a focus for the deconstruction of the National Curriculum policy text and a school text book representation of that text. It is suggested that the ideology underlying these texts does not discourage or call to question the construction of racist views about people and places. By drawing on a post‐structuralist perspective which focuses on four guiding principles, the article demonstrates how place knowledge in the geography curriculum can be reconstructed.