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The chapter provides an introduction to the current challenges facing many research-intensive universities throughout the world. It is argued that issues related to teaching and learning are becoming more important as a way to improve competitiveness and institutional profiling in a more globalized higher education sector. However, fostering change in research-intensive universities is often dependent on careful design addressing the normative, practical and organizational factors that may prevent institutional transformation. In the conclusion, it is underlined that initiatives that aim at cultural transformation may be a fruitful way forward for institutions trying to enhance their teaching and learning in a more systematic way.

Michael Young has written extensively about "powerful knowledge" as the type of knowledge that should be central in education: knowledge that isamong many other thingsreliable and potentially testable, that helps us understand the natural and social world, and offers us a language to engage meaningfully in moral and political debates. As a contribution to the powerful knowledge debate, the authors introduce a so-called knowledge curve, depicting types of knowledge along the axes of level of abstraction and degree of explanatory power. They argue that combining elements of knowledge that are situated on different positions on this curve is what makes the use of knowledge and the thinking process powerful. The implications for school geography are illustrated with the example of global south to north migration.

Thispaper reports onempirical research in four countries on thegrowing interest in the perceived ‘gap ’ between school and university human geography. Focusing on urban geography, we investigated the views of teachers and academic geographers about key elements of the field and those that were important for geography education. These views were compared with the urban geography in each country’s curriculum and two sets of textbooks for the lower secondary age group. Findings suggest that there is indeed a ‘gap ’ between the urban geographies taught at school and university level, at least as represented by the sources we accessed. The teachers ’ responses to curriculum change in this aspect of geography were mixed – some were keen to embrace new topics, others were happy with the current material. A further stage of the research will examine children’s views about, and interests in urban geography, in order to inform curriculum development. doi: 10.2167/irgee210.