GeoCapabilities

Spending another day today preparing for a meeting for this project which I'm currently involved with. It's later in the week in Brussels, which is a little way from home.... I'm helping with some of the outputs from the project with respect to teaching materials, through the Institute of Education.

It involves geography educators from across Europe, and the USA.

Geo-capabilities 2: teachers as curriculum leaders [“GeoCap2”]
(539079-LLP-1-2013-1-UK-COMENIUS-CMP)


Background: “in providing high quality teaching about complex issues in Europe, it is critically important for teachers to have sound content knowledge, pedagogic awareness, pedagogic content knowledge, curricular knowledge, and knowledge of learners to be effective in the classroom”.
[In short: the need for teachers to be effective ‘curriculum makers’]

Objective: “to create a teacher training course to develop teachers as curriculum leaders … through a ‘capabilities’ approach
Embracing: Diversity – culture, language; and Citizenship – democracy
Stressing: Innovation and performance, or ‘curriculum making’
[In short: how can the ‘capabilities approach’ help strengthen curriculum making?]

Outputs:to develop and pilot an online professional development communications platform for teacher preparation in geography.”
Resources (teaching materials and communications tools)
Trans-European collaborations
Online teacher exchanges
[NB: ‘powerful geographical knowledge’ is the baseline, the context and the content. 
We stress the ‘Geo’ in the Geo-Capabilities approach]


Impact: We will produce materials and a conceptual framework for curriculum thinking that will be complimentary to ‘competence-based’ curricula. The latter may stress learning outcomes rather than educational aims. We say both are important. Curriculum leadership is the key.

Check out the website, or follow on Twitter @geocapabilities

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