Geography: equality, diversity and inclusion in the study of people, places and economies

Published: Wednesday 10 Aug 2022

Our Curriculum Manager for Geography, Stacey Hill, tells us how the team is looking ahead to future reform to ensure the landscape of their subject is fully diverse and inclusive.

According to the Royal Geographical Society, as a subject, Geography uptake at GCSE has increased by more than 50% since 2010. Much of this growth has come predominantly from those groups who were previously less likely to study Geography: Black, Asian and minority ethnic pupils; pupils with lower prior attainment and those from low-income backgrounds; (RGS 2020).

What could be more diverse than the study of people and places?

Studying Geography allows young people to develop their understanding of places, people and the interactions between them. It does perhaps provide a huge opportunity to give young people the opportunity to see the world through several lenses, to see Geography that is representative of them and their experiences.

When drilling down to the subject matter, Geography is undeniably diverse, but we should ask ourselves whether we do enough justice to how places, people and economies are always represented?

When it comes to equality, diversity and inclusion in the Curriculum, the challenges for Geography are different to many other subjects. We don’t for example require students to study specific people or places (beyond the UK), and teachers have the opportunity to choose places that exemplify content contained within the specification.

This freedom allows teachers opportunities to select places to study at different scales that can be representative of the students that they teach, allowing them the opportunity to relate to the content that they study in a more intimate way.

This is of course a challenge for teachers, and we need to support them in doing this. It should be recognised, however, that there are opportunities within existing Curriculum content which could be more inclusive and diverse, which leaves us with several questions to answer.

For example, how we can ensure a people, environment and economic focus in more equal measures. How we can diversify from Eurocentric perspectives and consider the experiences of different groups of people. This applies to study of the UK, its landscapes and people as well as to the wider world. It must be recognised that our assessment material, how we use data, stimuli and case studies is also important in influencing the approaches teachers take when designing their Curriculum.

The importance of the subject community and academic expertise

We recognise that we cannot do this alone, and understand how important it is to seek the expertise of teachers and academics in the subject community. AQA has worked closely with key academics and teachers to look at specification content, and highlight opportunities where we may be able to better support teachers to develop their own curriculum and where we might seek to influence change to subject content in the future.

Working with publishers

We also recognise the influence that support materials can have, and how choices made by publishers can influence how subject content may be taught in schools (for example the imagery used to represent different places or people). We’re building our links with those publishers to address any issues.

Next steps

We want to use everything we’ve learnt to put us in the best possible shape for any future subject reform, and to make sure any changes are meaningful and guided by research and current thinking. All of this takes time and this is just the beginning of our work. We plan now to take these findings to the teaching community that we serve for their views on the challenges, the change they’d like to see and a pedagogical view on best practice.

If you’d like to read about the progress being made across the humanities, please take a look at what we’re doing in History and Religious Studies.

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