The condition of school geography in Mexico

Abstract

This thesis is a critical study of the form and purpose of geography in the secondary school curricula in Mexico. I analyse the epistemic structure of the school geography curriculum in Mexico and question its potential to allow/prevent students from developing critical geographical thinking. Drawing upon primary and secondary sources, the thesis provides a historical account of contemporary official curricular documents and geography textbooks. This analysis focuses on changes and continuity in educational discourse, proposed pedagogy, and the selection, distribution, and hierarchical organisation of geography contents. As a result of this work, from a critical realist position, I argue that school geography is a form of institutionalised knowledge and thus carries political messages. I argue that in its most recent iteration, school geography in Mexico subordinates its contents to a discourse that focuses on pedagogical practice and to the transmission of civic moral values that support hegemonic neoliberal ends. However, I suggest there remains the possibility to resist these ideological messages. I argue that in a society that claims to be democratic and socially just, access to a foundation of sound epistemic coherent geography knowledge should be an entitlement of all citizens and that the National Curriculum can become the institutional means to assert that entitlement. Since choices of knowledge matter, as they become the institutionally legitimised geographical imaginaries, what geography knowledge we choose for the curriculum will guide and validate specific ways of thinking geographically. This means that school geography curriculum choices are choices of ways of thinking about the relations among humans and between humans and nature, about time and space perceptions, and about ways of depicting and making representations of what is real; hence the crucial importance that curricular reflections about “what” to teach come hand in hand with considerations about “what for” and “for whom.” These last questions address ethical-political aspects of the condition of school geography as they relate directly to young students, their families and the nation’s overall life. I affirm in consequence that the condition of school geography is ethical and political. I argue that a critical geography curriculum follows the thread of carefully crafted geographical questions addressing overall reality aspects and their connections to students’ lives. In constructing those questions, consciousness emerges as a possibility to critically examine the same systemic reality in which those questions arise. This research contributes to the work of geography teachers and researchers interested in developing different ways of thinking the curriculum and the importance of geography education as a whole. Its results support a plausible National Education Program that includes a critical geography education that is ethical, hopeful, and committed to the principle of affirmation of life by aiming to build a Mexican society that can be a free and sustainable human community.