ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the Geo Capabilities project to explore school geography's contribution to citizenship education. The Geo Capabilities project is not explicitly concerned with citizenship education, still less about "spatial citizenship"—a term first coined by Thomas Jekel and colleagues. To organize teaching in a way that brings about powerful school geography requires what the Geo Capabilities project describes as specialist "curriculum leadership," manifest through effective curriculum making. Spatial citizenship captures the importance of using spatial representations to develop competence with Geographical Information technologies, in order to participate effectively in society. A strong sense of the global is derived from powerful geographical knowledge that is available to all—if there are specialist teachers equipped and available to teach it. The prominent geographer Doreen Massey argued that geography is a discipline that helps us "take on the world" by revealing the concept of the planet as a whole and the realization that every locality on Earth is connected to global processes.
