ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the complex relationships between ICT and ‘subject cultures’. The school system in England and Wales has been characterised as dominated by a strongly classified curriculum based around school subjects. Since the mid-1960s an increased number of commentators have argued for alternative forms of ‘integrated’ curriculum. ICT has played an important part in this challenge to the subject-based curriculum, because it is seen as signalling a different view of knowledge. At the same time, one of the main routes into schools of ICT has been through its adoption and integration within existing school subjects (the other route has been the ICT component of the National Curriculum). When considering the role of ICT in the curriculum there is a tendency to talk as if it has an agency and power of its own – it is as if the technology is simply there waiting to be picked up. But of course ICT is used as a resource by specific groups who have an interest in promoting its use. This chapter aims to:
• consider the ways in which ICT is located in schools in a wider social and cultural context;
• consider how it has played its part in the ‘subject culture’ of school geography;
• discuss more recent arguments about the way ICT offers challenges to the curriculum.
