Response to Stannard

Abstract

Kevin Stannard's commentary provides further evid ence of the need to connect academic geography to the wider community of geographers. Stannard seeks to engage and extend a theme I identified in 'Geography as the world discipline' (Bonnett 2003), i.e. the lack of active involvement of geography academics in school education. The portrait he offers is essential reading for university geographers, many of whom have only the dimmest sense of geography teachers' struggle to maintain the discipline. Readers of both Stannard's comment and my article will notice many shared aspirations. They will also encounter a certain disconnection of aspirations. Both of us appear to be looking to the other for assistance. Stannard offers a depiction of school geography as intellectually moribund and wants the intellectual dynamism of academic geography to be disseminated into the secondary curriculum. In contrast, I argued that academic geography has become increasingly parochial and needs to become far more open to the international concerns and agendas that animate so much interest in the discipline outside higher education. These interpretations are not entirely con tradictory, but they might cause us to pause before we throw our respective babies out with our respective bathwaters. Infanticide apart, at the heart of the debate on the role and future of geography is the issue of progres sion. Evangelizing missions to schools spreading the word about geography will count for little if univer sity geography does not engage, develop and chal lenge the kind of geographical knowledge that students bring to their first year of undergraduate study. In order to do this, it is necessary to have an intimate sense of what that knowledge is and how it is taught. However, my article was also trying to make a broader point: that geography exceeds the education system. It has a wide cultural base and incorporates a diverse community of writers, readers and practitioners who are engaged with international and environmental concerns. Stannard takes a mild swipe at what he sees as my failure to sufficiently distinguish school geography from journalistic geo graphy, suggesting that this puts 'A level geography on a par with knowledge and perspectives gained from the odd newspaper article or a Discovery Channel documentary'. There is, admittedly, something clumsy about the sweeping and inclusive way I employed the term 'popular geography' in my earlier article. However, this sprawling category had a serious intellectual purpose, namely to open up our delibera tions on the nature of the field to a much wider sense of geography as part of the modern experience. This broader perspective enables us to see that students come into university geography not merely with the specific knowledge of another formal curriculum, but with an interest in and expectations of geography de veloped from multiple sources. These sources may include the geographical media, as well as other experiences, such as 'the gap year' and environ mental activism, that are felt to be establishing geo graphical knowledge. University geography needs to be able to recognize and engage this wider discip linary context if it is to claim a key role in public life. Stannard's horror at the idea that an A-level in geography could be dropped as a prerequisite for university entry is understandable and, in large part, appropriate. It still appears that the fates of university and school geography are inextricable. However, my argument also suggests that geography could and should do far more to sell itself to a wider constitu ency; that those who are passionate about the dis cipline can come from many different quarters and should not be confronted and rejected by a rigidly institutional interpretation of the nature of intellectual progression in the subject.