Evidence from an ethnographic study of three secondary school geography departments in England is drawn on to describe aspects of the relationships between examination boards and school subjects. This paper focuses on one department, in 'Town Comprehensive', and the argument is illustrated through a discussion of observed lessons with a teacher in this department. Ofqual have recently announced that examination boards may continue to endorse commercially available teaching resources. The argument presented in the current paper extends possible areas of 'risk' identified beyond those they currently consider. Specifically, it is argued that chief examiners play multiple roles in the recontextualisation of knowledge, holding substantial power over school subjects. The strong role of accreditation as a rationale is argued to restrict knowledge taught in school geography to horizontal discourses, limiting students' access to powerful knowledge.2
This paper sheds light on an important and underresearched issue: The sources of information about climate change that teachers use. Utilising a 'scoping review' methodological approach, we analysed over 600 papers to address two main questions: What sources of information about climate change are teachers using? In what ways are teachers using these sources of information? Through our use of inclusive search terms and detailed analysis of papers, we found only 13 studies of relevance, none of which primarily focus on the sources of information teachers use. The 13 studies are all located in the Global North, and within this nearly half are in the USA. Methodologically, all apart from two rely on teachers' reports rather than observation or other methods. Four types of sources of information were frequently mentioned: The Internet; government sources; mass media and professional development courses. The 'superabundance' of information now available to teachers (particularly online), the importance of high-quality information for students' understandings of climate change, and the limited research on the sources of information about climate change that teachers use makes this is a significant
Teaching can be a hard job, and sustaining teachers throughout their career can be a challenge, facing pressure from performativity, increasing accountability, and increases in teacher workload (Clarke, 2013;Ball, 2003). Findings are presented from an ethnographic study of secondary school geography departments in England. Every teacher in these departments told compelling stories about their personal histories that have led them to being a geography teacher. The areas of subject specialism they claim are not arbitrary, but are often described through narratives in which events from childhood, schooling, and university are re-told, emphasising their long-standing acquaintance with, and passion for certain geographical issues. Departmental organisational types are discussed, and significant differences between departments are highlighted. Within departments, teachers' individual geographical stories may be retold to construct collective narratives. These departmental, collective stories position teachers in relation to one another, and offer a further dimension of support for teachers' identity and status. Further, longitudinal research is suggested as one way of developing understandings about the ways in which teachers' individual stories might be re-told in dialogue with the collective stories told by their departments.
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