GEReCo UK IGU-CGE

Geography Education Research Collective / UK Commission on Geographical Education of the International Geographical Union

GEReCo Masters Dissertation Award

*Open for submissions until April ’25, for degrees confirmed between Jan ’24 and Dec ’24.*

Through this annual award, GEReCo seeks to celebrate and amplify the voices of emerging researchers who are shaping the future of geography education. We invite submissions from Masters students who have demonstrated exceptional scholarship and dedication to enhancing geography education.

Eligibility:

  • Applications are encouraged from applicants studying any aspect of geography education on any Masters course at any higher education institution globally (dissertations should be submitted in English, and be 10,000 words or more in length)
  • The degree should have been confirmed between Jan 2023 and December 24
  • Applicants can only submit in one award cycle
  • Applications can be made by students or by their supervisors (with students’ permission)

Application: 

Please submit the following by the end of April 2025:

  1. Enter your details here: https://forms.office.com/e/0GxepwuaEh
  2. Email a copy of your dissertation, plus a supervisor’s supporting statement (max 500 words) to: mail@gereco.org

Prizes:

  • Winning dissertation receives £100
  • Summary of the research presented as a GEReCo blog
  • A highly commended dissertation will also be named each year

Judging:

Nominations are scored by a GEReCo selection panel[1] who will apply the following criteria:

  1. Quality of research (all theoretical and methodological approaches are welcomed; quality is judged as appropriate for the nature and context of the work and giving due regard to ethical considerations)
  2. Critical engagement with the literature in geography education (understanding geography education broadly to include multiple fields related to the area, for example, see Puttick, 2022)
  3. Potential contribution to geography education (which might include but is not limited to curriculum, policy and teachers’ practice)

Previous winners:

2024:

Florence Smart (MSc Learning and Teaching, University of Oxford) Winning dissertation prize for a thesis titled: Postcolonial Pedagogy: An investigation into live global voices in the geography classroom.

Martin Sutton (MA Education Geography, IoE/UCL) Highly Commended dissertation, titled: To what extent can online coaching software help trainee geography teachers to summatively assess pupils’ GCSE Geography examination answers?

[1] To avoid possible conflicts of interest, panel members are not allocated or involved in making decisions about dissertations they have been involved in supervising or examining.