ABSTRACT
The notion of ‘pedagogy as interruption’ is rooted in the principle that whilst key aims of education are often expressed as qualification acquisition and socialisation, there is a third aim – to develop students’ sense of their own uniqueness by interrupting their understanding of the familiar in daily life. In this chapter, we consider ways in which school geography can interrupt students’ understanding of their familiar places. Students aged 11–12 years in their first year of secondary school participated in a sequence of geography lessons, including fieldwork, taking photography of their familiar places and small-group curation these photographs to create montages of now-reimaged places. Three concepts identified by the students as significant to their understanding of places – time and change, scale and difference, and connections – provided a framework for analysing the outcomes and examining the extent to which students’ thinking about their places was interrupted. Our discussions demonstrate that the more open-ended pedagogies utilised in the lessons enabled students’ understanding of their places to become more complex and nuanced. However, although we conclude that time to create a school geography that develops students’ uniqueness is difficult, and possibly risky, it is nonetheless essential to achieving this third aim of education.
