Professor John Morgan

On Thursday this week (30.01.25), I received two messages. The first was to announce the publication of the Handbook of Geography Education, edited by Sarah Bednarz and Jerry Mitchell. The second was a reminder that Norman Graves was celebrating his 100th birthday. It was a fitting coincidence because Norman Graves was one of the founders of the field of geography education research during his tenure at the University of London Institute of Education (now UCL). Although there are few direct references to Graves’s work (about a dozen), the Handbook reflects the work he did to define the problem-space of the field.

Elsewhere, I have often remarked that the making of modern geography education at least in the UK can be dated to the publication of three founding texts. These are Graves’s (1975) Geography education, David Hall’s (1976) Geography and the geography teacher, and Bill Marsden’s (1976) Evaluating the geography curriculum. Published around the same time, what they had in common is that they were attempting to make sense for teachers of the convergence of curriculum theory and geographical theory. Geography was going undergoing its conceptual revolution and education was being reshaped by new findings from educational psychology and the introduction of rational curriculum planning. Graves summarised the challenges for geography teachers, who must make sense of the philosophical basis of their teaching and consider psychological questions of how young people learn. He noted that there were sociological questions of why some children learned faster and more effectively, but this was not his prime concern (even though it was of growing interest to others and spawned the birth of the ‘new sociology of education’ (Young 1971) also at the Institute of Education (IoE).

Graves offered a pragmatic solution to the question of the overarching conceptual framework or ‘paradigm’ with which to work. He suggested there were three such paradigms vying for attention in geography in the 1970s. These were the spatial organisation paradigm, ecosystem paradigm, and critical social science. He stated his preference for the ecosystem paradigm as most effectively allowing teachers to make the transition from the old regional paradigm to the new geography in school. He was unclear about the value that critical social science or radical geography might have for the subject in schools.

In passing we should note that Graves advocated and set the standard for using educational research as the basis for rational curriculum planning. In this he was very much a product of the time. Graves joined the IoE in the mid-1960s the time of the expansion of teacher training and educational research. He introduced the landmark MA in Geography Education in 1978. Dennis Lawton had been appointed as the first Professor of Curriculum Studies in 1964, and Harold Rosen and James Britton led the English section. They set about modernizing the training of teachers in the face of comprehensive schooling and curriculum change. Graves’s 1975 book Geography education was based on these courses. This was the first shift towards curriculum theory in geography education and his follow up – Curriculum Planning in Geography (1979) – defined the curriculum problem for teachers and offered practical advice on how to solve it.

Graves, like all of us, was shaped by the politics of the time. He took up his role at the IoE at the height of the progressive educational settlement, a time of optimism about the prospects for improving learning for all, and teachers and teacher educators enjoyed relative autonomy.  The frontiers of knowledge about the organization of learning were expanding, and universities were trusted as the best place to codify and pass on this knowledge. Those who worked with Graves took on and developed many of the ideas (Ashley Kent, Eleanor Rawling, Mick Naish, Frances Slater and a little later, David Lambert). By the late 1970s this consensus was beginning to breakdown and education policy took on a harder edge. Graves wrote increasingly about the need to defend teacher education (this is part of a longer story for another time).

For now, I simply want to acknowledge that what we recognise as the field of geography education research owes much to Norman Graves who effectively defined the problems of the field. Things have moved on, of course, and by the 1990s teacher education was increasingly defined by technocratic approaches and the critical turns in academic geography posed new challenges for curriculum theory in geography education. The internationalization of the field, something Graves encouraged and was part of, has brought with it new ways of writing and thinking about geography education, as reflected in Bednarz and Mitchell’s impressive Handbook of Geography Education.

The publication of this major contribution to geography education research on the centenary of one of its founders reminds us that we have always been, and remain, Gravesian in some way, whether this is explicitly acknowledged or not.

References

Bednarz, S. and Mitchell, J. (2025). Handbook of geography education. Springer.  https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007/978-3-031-72366-7

Graves, N.J. (1975). Geography in Education. London: Heinemann  Educational Books.

Graves, N. J. (1979). Curriculum planning in geography. London: Heinemann  Educational Books.

Hall, D. (1976). Geography and the geography teacher. Unwin Education Books.

Marsden, W.E. (1976) Evaluating the geography curriculum. London: Oliver and Boyd.

Young, M. F. D. (1971) (Ed) Knowledge and Control: new directions for the sociology of education. London: Collier-Macmillan