Principles

A capabilities approach repositions the contribution of the discipline (geography) to the education of young people within a capabilities framework. It derives from the original work of Amatya Sen and Martha Nussbaum on welfare economics and is an attempt to take capability principles and locate them within a geography education context.

Powerful disciplinary knowledge (PDK) is fundamental to the GeoCapabilities approach, yet teachers in more challenging schools have been found to be constrained in their ability to enact a ‘powerful’ curriculum which may transform young people’s lives (see Mitchell, 2015).

The intention of GeoCapabilities 3 is to support teachers in developing their curriculum making capacity and in so doing enable them to engage with important curriculum questions such as what kinds of geographical knowledge are taught in schools, who decides and why, and what kinds of pedagogies are needed to teach powerful disciplinary knowledge (PDK) to students.

Subject leadership is a key principle of GeoCapabilities and the project aims to develop the associate teachers as curriculum leaders who will support other geography teachers in similar contexts in their countries to use GeoCapabilities to enhance their geography teaching. Through developing curriculum leadership the project will generate a sustainable momentum, which will carry forward as the associate teachers work with other teachers in future, disseminating the GeoCapabilities approach.