Expanding students' concept of ‘home’: Teaching migration with a geographic capabilities approach

Abstract

‘GeoCapabilities’ emphasises how the discipline of geography can contribute to a young person’s freedom to make choices about how they live in the world. However, teachers can face challenges in accessing and recontextualising knowledge drawn from academic research. This is a significant barrier to the ideal of GeoCapabilities being enacted in schools and particularly in schools under pressures of accountability which can restrict teachers’ agency as curriculum makers. In this chapter, we draw on empirical findings from the recent GeoCapabilities 3 project to argue that this barrier can be tackled by a form of teacher scholarship. In GeoCapabilities 3, teacher scholarship was nurtured by collaborative action research bringing teachers and academics together around a current issue – migration.