Digital technologies and their roles in knowledge recontextualisation and curriculum making

Abstract

Today, the quantity and international dispersal of information is unprecedented, and while we know that teachers are making increasing use of online resources (Sorensen et al., 2014; Puttick, 2017), little is known about their searches for and selections of information. The mobility of information (Cresswell, 2011) connecting people through ideas, resources and artefacts is most commonly associated with connectivity via the internet (or being online). To ‘Google’ something is a significant aspect of the epistemic environments in which teachers now work. Digital technologies play an important role in normalising particular epistemological strategies for establishing the legitimacy and authority of claims, and technology more broadly plays multiple roles for teachers accessing, manipulating, disseminating and presenting information in their curriculum making. The recent ‘digital turn’ in geography (Ash et al., 2018) has begun to explore the intensifying relationships between ‘the digital’ and geography, and this development in the discipline presents opportunities for school geography. By drawing on examples of teachers’ uses of digital technologies from ethnographic research with school geography departments, this chapter explores some of the ways in which digital technologies are shaping teachers’ curriculum making, and argues that a productive relationship with the digital geographies being produced in the discipline offers significant potential to enrich school geography.