ABSTRACT
If this book has been challenging to put together, then it is worth recording that the brief we set ourselves and the authors was a demanding one, covering a wide field. We have assembled chapters that contextualise citizenship in geography education historically, internationally and through processes of values education that have long been advocated for use in geography classrooms (Chapters 2-5). A sequence of five chapters (Chapters 6-10) explored the capacity of geography as a school subject to help pupils’ encounters with environmental debates, with questions of identity and community, with ‘otherness’ and exclusion. These chapters have together produced an extensive list of concepts that geography can introduce and clarify for young people, including political structures, democracy, culture, racism and the contingent nature of nations, their boundaries and much more. In short, these chapters have discussed place and space in pursuit of understanding society and environment. We believe discussions of this nature are not only desirable but essential for teachers to have, given that they are producing educated citizens. The authors of a further two chapters (Chapters 11-12) take the discussion right back into school, reviewing appropriate classroom pedagogies for citizenship education and discussing issues arising from the tensions that inevitably arise when change is advocated or imposed.
