ABSTRACT
Taken as a whole, one of the purposes of this book is to help you make sense of your professional identity as a geography teacher. It is important to grapple with this because ‘professional identity’ is not so much given, as won. The standards for the award of Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) (www.tta.gov.uk/training/qtsstandards/)can provide the basis on which to establish what we call ‘practitioner capacity’. But we want to appeal to the subject specialist in you. It is the desire to create ‘productive pedagogies’—i.e. designing geography lessons that stimulate relevant, worthwhile and enjoyable learning-that fuels the growth in this capacity. Certainly, this is not a ‘child-centred’ view, but neither is it a ‘subject-centred’ view. It is arguably teacher-centred, however, in that it is interested in melding from these equally limited ‘positions’ a learning-oriented motive, steered by the teacher’s interest in the pupils’ well-being and happiness, and the value or relevance of what is being learned.
