‘My Journey to School …’: Foregrounding the Meaning of School Journeys and Children's Engagements and Interactions in their Everyday Localities

This paper gives prominence to children's own accounts of school journeys. The characteristics of school journeys in Fife, Scotland are outlined, and the nature of children's school journey experiences discussed. The focus is on children in the latter years of primary school, concentrating mainly on the experiences of those who walk without adult accompaniment on their school journeys. By drawing attention to the meaning of these journeys to children this paper brings to the fore children's active and imaginative engagements in and with their environments. This situates school journeys as an integral part of children's geographies indicative of the regulation of the child's realm and the active part which children play in redefining this.     

Renegotiating the Primary School: Children's Emotional Geographies of Sport,Exercise and Active Play

The current UK policy concern with children's health has led to primary school practices of sport, exercise and active play aimed, in particular, at constructing children's bodies as ‘healthy’. Qualitative explorations of children's own values and experiences however, reveal that their understandings of sport in school differ considerably from its potential to be healthy, instead emphasising emotional geographies of pleasure and enjoyment. This article aims to develop a better understanding of children's ability to modify and reconstitute discursive corporeal regimes through their own agency, thus highlighting the fluid nature of the primary school as an institution. Adult discourses and children's bodily challenges to these mingle and intersect, creating spaces of competing values and discourses that work to transform and renegotiate the primary school. Although this article focuses particularly on the UK context, the findings will be relevant for any country in which child obesity is of current concern for social and education policy.     

Imagined Country: National Environmental Ideologies in School Geography Textbooks

This essay considers the "imagined geographies" of Britain found in school geography textbooks in the postwar period. The first part of the essay considers the role that school geography plays in processes of social reproduction. It suggests that textbooks represent an important resource through which meanings are negotiated in the everyday lives of teachers and students. The second part of the essay discusses some of the specific "national environmental ideologies" found in geographies of Britain. The essay concludes with a discussion of the wider context in which geographies of Britain are taught in schools.     

Changing children's geographies

This keynote explores the changing nature of children's geographies as an academic project. It proceeds in four parts. Part 1 considers the shift away from research on children's spatial cognition which envisaged the child in largely biological terms, and contemplates contemporary efforts to rework the nature/culture dualism. Part 2 traces the incorporation of new social studies of childhood into geography, emphasising the importance of children's voices, their positioning within axes of power, and the need for quantitative and qualitative methods. Part 3 explores how feminist research led to interest in parents, educators and other actors/institutions which shape, and are shaped by, children's lives. Part 4 ponders what children's geographies might add to, and learn from, broader interdisciplinary debates, and the benefits and pitfalls of research impact. The conclusion argues that a well-informed appreciation of sub-disciplinary history provides a strong vantage point from which to engage with new ways of thinking.     

Nationality and children's drawings — pictures ‘about Scotland’ by primary school children in Edinburgh,Scotland and Syracuse,New York State

The way that children perceive and understand places and locations is an area of geographical research that had an intermittent history until the 1990s saw a sustained interest in ‘children's geographies’. Here I build upon these studies and those of spatial cognition, developmental psychology, constructions of nation and nationality, by asking children to draw pictures about a nation. I review this methodology and analyse drawings collected from work with children in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Syracuse, New York State. I obtained 127 pictures ‘about Scotland’ drawn by six to nine year olds. These drawings reveal a range of stereotypical images of Scotland that are learned, both nationally and internationally, by this early age. They also suggest that knowledge and experience of Scotland varies by school district in each location and that these children often intertwine personal and national narratives when representing Scotland.     

Geography and the Australian Curriculum: Unfulfilled Knowledges in Secondary School Education

The introduction of geography as a separate discipline within the Australian Curriculum offers hope for revitalisation of the subject in Australian school education after decades of decline. Since the 1990s, the subject has been largely submerged within an integrated curriculum framework that has had significant consequences for the presence and character of secondary school geography. Its inclusion in the learning area of SOSE (Studies of Society and Environment) within schools has diluted the degree, breadth and depth of geographical education. However, in spite of the hope provided by its re‐institution, the process of national curriculum construction has had disconcerting consequences for the type of geography being offered to Australian students at the secondary level. Building on critical overviews of the history of secondary geography as an Australian school subject since the 1980s, recent philosophical discourse on approaches to geographical knowledge in a school context, and the author's personal experience as a geographical educator and researcher, this paper argues that the nature of knowledge embodied by the new geography study design in Years 7–10 is flawed in both its scope and its direction. While reflecting many of the characteristics of a social realist approach to geographical knowledge, the Australian Curriculum minimises the elements of critical analysis that provide geography with its unique educational identity and value.     

Not just growing up,but going on: Materials,Spacings, Bodies,Situations

This paper argues that non-representational theories, relating to materialities, spacings, embodiments and events, are important to children's geographies. In so doing, it suggests in particular that we might engage with the becoming-ness of children's geographies in a number of new ways. This point is made via four (ostensibly banal, everyday) examples: wearing glasses; visiting the local park; being clumsy; and one's first day in school. Through this juxtaposition, the paper insists that children's geographies are and can be complex, mundane, unsettling and thoroughly material-spatial-embodied-evental. In other words, there is more to children's geographies than purely representational or symbolic notions of Growing Up. Rather, it is argued that there is always-already-all-sorts-going-on-…     

'To Go Back up the Side Hill': Memories,Imaginations and Reveries of Childhood

This paper offers theoretical reflections on how adult researchers access, process and represent the 'worlds' of children and childhood. Recognising previous claims and warnings issued by geographers, it is argued that researchers can and should take advantage of the fact that all adult researchers have once been children, meaning that there are always fragments of connection allowing 'us' at least some intimation of children's geographies as experiencede and imagined from within . Gaston Bachelard's (1969a) 'poetics of reverie' is partially built upon just such a sense of connection, laying out the basis for a phenomenology of childhood wherein adults seek an imaginative revisiting of the reveries--the absent-minded daydreaming--of 'bored' and 'idle' children. This paper provides a critical exegesis of Bachelard's work in this respect, emphasising the importance to his thinking of geography, landscape and environment as both elements within and embodied spurs to childhood reverie. Questions about the admixture of adult imagination and memory in the recovery of childhood reverie are considered, and conclusions are reached about what can usefully be taken from Bachelard's 'poetics of childhood', notably in terms of a methodology of 'not doing too much' as an adult researcher in this field. Claims are also made about needing to take more seriously than hitherto the mundane reveries of childhood, those contained in children's own undirected jottings, drawings and play, as a possible source for future inquiries into children's geographies.     

Geographies of environmental learning: an exploration of children's use of school grounds

There has been limited recent geographic research on children's use of school grounds. This study explores the impact of school grounds on the play behaviours of children in primary schools. It examines the way in which some features of school grounds stimulate more of the type of play that is likely to produce environmental learning. The paper reports on research findings from two primary schools in Canberra, Australia. At each school, multiple research techniques were employed, including behaviour mapping of children's play, interviews with children, and analysis of children's drawings of their school grounds. Children's play in one school displayed high levels of interaction with the natural environment. The paper provides insights on the potential of school grounds as sites for environmental learning.     

Children's Understanding of Aerial Photographs

As aerial photographs are widely used in geography education, it is important to know how children's understanding of these representations develops through the school years. We review research that has addressed children's understanding of the content of aerial photographs, and we describe a series of studies in which children used information from aerial photographs to carry out spatial tasks in a large space. We demonstrate that using an aerial photograph can be an aid to subsequently using a map, and we discuss the educational applications of the research with aerial photographs.     

Young people's cartographies of school choice: the urban imaginary and moral panic

A critical geography of school choice illuminates how parental school choice reproduces unequal urban conditions. This paper contributes to this scholarship by arguing that the reproduction of urban spaces is reinforced by the ways the dominant urban imaginary shapes how youths imagine and organise their school options. I draw from the fields of critical geography, school choice, and sociology of moral panic to theorise how children's geographies are informed by the dominant urban imaginary and reconstituted reiteratively by moral anxiety. Through this lens, I analyse ethnographic data collected on school choice policy, along with interviews with 59 youth (ages 11–19) in Vancouver, Canada. My analysis demonstrates that the dominant forms of classed stigmatisation of marginalised urban schools are important to young people's rejection of those schools. My analysis also shows that moral panic and rising fears of violence underwrite the spatial patterns of youth participation in school choice.     

Emplacing Current Trends in Feminist Historical Geography

In this article, the authors assess some of the major trends within anglophonic feminist historical geography appearing in the decade since Rose & Ogborn called for the development of an explicitly feminist approach to the subfield. In examining the 'geography' of feminist historical geographies, three main categories of scholarship are evident: a 'new' historical geography of North America, portions of which are informed by feminist theories and methods; a British school of feminist historical geography with a focus on the discipline of geography, geographical knowledges and colonialism/imperialism; and feminist historical geography interventions in cultural politics of space and place. A diversity of feminist methods and epistemologies appears across the literature. In an attempt to avoid a reading of these trends as better or worse approximations of historical 'progress', the authors conceptualize them as emplaced within a number of specific social and spatial contexts. Most recent work is concerned with the production of gender differences as they are worked through economic, political, cultural and sexual differences in the creation of past geographies. The continued need simply to write women into historical narratives and geographies, however, is also evident. The work of feminist historical geography questions and challenges geography's masculinist historical record.     

‘In the best interests of the child’: juggling the geography of children's gardens (between adult agendas and children's needs)

This review paper presents literature, particularly in children's geographies, in support of the proposition that the rationales for the current children's garden movement flourishing particularly in the United States, albeit well-intentioned, continue to be dominated by adult discourses acting ‘in the best interests of the child’. The paper concludes that broadening the debate on ‘children and gardens’ through inclusion of research that focuses on children's competence and empowerment offers a different perspective of what children might want from these spaces. This highlights new directions for research on children's gardens which would focus this garden typology more on children's needs than adult agendas, and therefore contribute positively to development of these gardens as sustainable environments for children's learning and enjoyment of nature.     

Ethnogeography: towards liberatory geography education

In the context of education in England, an argument is put forward that Geography, as it is conceptualised in the National Curriculum, does not connect to either primary school pupils or their teachers. Reasons for this are explored and a proposal is made for a new paradigm for primary geography: ethnogeography. This proposal parallels work on ethnomathematics, which provides a political agenda to the study of maths and itself draws from Paulo Freire's politicization and consciousness raising through adult literacy. This pattern is applied to learning in geographical education. Drawing on the findings of a recent research project, a case is argued for ethnogeography and the implications for primary Initial Teacher Education courses, learners and the curriculum in primary schools and are considered.     

Stories in Space: The Geographies of Children's Literature

This paper argues for the uses of children's literature in the study of children's geographies. It focuses in particular on the nature of representations of urban space in children's literature, a genre more usually connected with the pastoral and explores the narrative strategies and approaches of children's literature which does venture into the city. I propose five modes in which the city is written for children and ask, from the position of literary criticism which distrusts children's stories' ability to speak for children, how far these modes can be said to coincide with children's lived experience of the city.     

Not nearly enough geography! University provision for England’s pre-service primary teachers

Research into geography provision in primary initial teacher education [ITE] courses in the United Kingdom and worldwide is very limited. England educates pre-service primary teachers of 5–11 year olds to be “generalists” who teach the full range of curriculum subjects, including geography. This article identifies that the provision of teaching time for geography is low and declining in England’s primary ITE courses. It presents a picture which may not seem dissimilar in other parts of the world. With only about half of pre-service primary teachers in England having studied geography after age 14, their subject knowledge appears weak. University-based ITE subject sessions rarely extend beyond introducing them to England’s primary geography requirements and to some approaches to teaching geography. Prospective primary teachers observe and teach limited, if any, geography in primary schools. Developing their geographical understanding and teaching capability is highly challenging for tutors. There are concerns that the current situation may well decline further. Encouragement exists to develop geography provision in primary ITE but the opportunities to achieve this appear increasingly constrained as the pre-service environment moves from university-led to school-led provision. International comparative research is essential to understand better pre-service primary teachers’ learning to teach geography.     

'My Son's a Bit Dizzy.' 'My Wife's a Bit Soft': Gender,children and cultures of parenting

What it means to be a child and what it means to be a parent are both cultural inventions, ideologies which are (re)constructed and (re)produced over time. The two are deeply intertwined. The dominant contemporary Western imagining of children as vulnerable and incompetent in public space contributes towards structuring the way that parents look after their offspring and determine their children's personal geographies. Children's safety in public space from traffic accidents and stranger-dangers is an issue that is high on the public agenda in the USA and UK, heightening parental anxieties about the amount of independence and spatial freedom they should grant their offspring. Mothers' and fathers' understandings of their children's safety and the culture and conduct of parenting are gendered processes. This paper therefore explores how parents' attitudes towards girls' and boys' respective vulnerabilities and competencies to handle danger in public space vary. It then goes on to consider the way that parental practices, such as taking responsibility for managing children's spatial boundaries and disciplining them for any infringements, are also gendered.     

Safe Places in Domestic Spaces: Two-Year-Olds at Play in their Homes

This paper contributes to the growing research literature on children's ‘intimate geographies’ by focusing on two-year-old children's explorations and play within the domestic spaces of their homes. It draws on video data showing three young girls playing in selected home spaces i.e. a family grocery shop in Peru, the upstairs rooms of a house in America, and the balcony of an apartment in Italy. Through analysis of short video sequences the paper describes the way children use and invest meaning in these spaces. It is argued that the three domestic locations can be seen as ‘safe places’, in both material and personal senses; and that they enable children's sense of belonging, foster their ‘emplaced knowledge’ and build on their confidence to explore spaces further afield.     

Children's projected political preference: transcending local politics

Traditionally, research on political preference has primarily focused on adults within their local political context. This research attempts to show that the perceived political preference of children is part of their national identity, and encompasses not only local politics but also the global and regional discourse. The present study surveyed 1187 Palestinian adolescents attending school, grades 5–7, in the West Bank to examine whether children's future political party preference is grounded in local/global discourse. The findings revealed a discrepancy between participants' perceptions of the local dominant political party and their projected political party preferences. This research argues that political party preference is facilitated through the transcendence of national identity embedded in children's geopolitical agency. The significance of the findings emphasizes that territorial boundaries are artificial; therefore, children's geopolitical agency is impacted by extraterritorial discourse and is able to transcend the local and regional context into a global politics.     

Transitional geographies: making mobile children

Geographers of childhood have variously accounted for the experiences of mobile children. Less has been said about the practices of becoming mobile, including the acquisition of skills, engagement with travel technologies and the shifting child–parent relations implicated in the process. This article explores the making of mobile children through ethnographic research with 7–12-year-olds practising the journey between home and school in Helsinki, Finland. Elaborating on the work of psychoanalyst Donald Woods Winnicott, it argues that families enact flexible spatial arrangements—transitional spaces—to experiment with their attachments to urban environments. Transitional spaces foreground the diverse relations between children, parents and the world, allowing the replacement of standard notions about growing up with situated accounts of how families make space for children's expanding mobilities. Against a cultural atmosphere stressing the risks and uncertainties of childhood, this view opens an affirmative approach to children's geographies—one that emphasises the trust, play and collaboration between adults, children and environments.