ABSTRACT
Mentoring provides an opportunity for teachers to be inducted into the repertoire of experience and theories that exist within the field of geography education. Geography and geography education scholarship can play a significant role in nourishing the professional practice of teachers and informing their professional decision-making. Engagement with geography scholarship provides a mechanism to sustain teachers’ subject expertise and provides scope for teachers to remain connected to the dynamic nature of academic geography. This chapter considers how engaging with geography and geography education scholarship can be used as means to: sustain geography teachers’ subject expertise, enable critical engagement within the curriculum policy context, situate beginning geography teachers’ practice within the context of other teachers’ curricular theorising and problem-solving, and render visible the disciplinary dimension of geography teachers’ curriculum work. This chapter considers how such scholarship can allow beginning teachers and mentors to think more deeply about their practice and be able to situate their practice in the context of the scholarship and practice of other geography teachers. The implications for mentors will be considered in terms of how scholarship can develop and sustain the mentors’ own career, and be deployed to shape beginning teachers’ targets and training activities, marshalled within mentor meeting discussion, and used in shared dialogue around lesson planning, observations and evaluations.
