Parramatta Marist High School is a school in Western Sydney, New South Wales, that has over 14 years of experience in project-based learning in Stages 4 and 5 (Years 7-10). Over this period, projects have been constantly developed, redeveloped and improved by teachers based on their experience and feedback from their colleagues and their students.…

In 2018, the National Committee for Geographical Sciences released "Geography: Shaping Australia's Future: a strategic plan for the discipline of geography." Throughout the strategic plan, the contribution of geographical understanding and research to Australia's environmental, economic, and social wellbeing is made clear, and a series…

Educational policy and management emphasise the role of science (e.g., earth science, geography) as a fundamental aspect of societal advance, but student enrolments at universities in these disciplines remain low. This commentary explores ways to foster more collaboration between university academics and high school teachers to implement…

In the Australian school curriculum, geography is housed within the humanities and social sciences. This classification affects the content within the curriculum, the backgrounds of teachers and their professional development opportunities, and also the expectations and subject choices of students. As an earth scientist working in the Australian…

Three decades ago, Stephen Kemmis (1990) argued that curricula provide insights into how nations and states interpret themselves and how they want to be interpreted. He also noted that 'debates about curriculum reveal fundamental concerns, uncertainties and tensions which preoccupy nations and states as they struggle to adapt to changing…

The three-dimensional design of the Australian Curriculum includes the cross-curriculum priorities (CCPs), learning areas and general capabilities (GCs). Geography teachers are uniquely positioned to address the CCPs through the subject's disciplinary focus on interrelationships between physical features of the earth with individual, social and…

The introduction of the Australian Curriculum in 2011 and 2012 brought with it a variety of responses, from consternation from some states less willing to give up their autonomous curriculum positioning through to significant optimism from educators and academics about the opportunities and benefits afforded by such a national curriculum…

Sustainability is an important cross-curriculum priority in Australian education that is not commonly realised in schools and classrooms. In this article, we discuss the challenges and opportunities to enacting sustainability, suggesting that both top-down (systemic schoolwide leadership and support) and bottom-up (individual educator's…

Knowledge of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures presents opportunities for geography students to learn about holistic belief systems that are spiritually and intellectually connected to the land, sea, sky and waterways. One means that geographers use to examine these connections is through the notion of relational space.…

Digital technologies such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can be innovative tools for learning when used in purposeful ways and embedded in sound pedagogical frameworks. The predominant skills stimulated through the use of GIS are querying, collecting, analysing and manipulating spatial data. In recent years, the financial, technological…

One of the questions being asked in schools is the extent to which Geography can be considered a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) subject. While such a question might be driven by those strategic opportunists seeking to elevate the status of the subject within the school's curriculum, or as a means of leveraging an increase…

This paper forms part of the response by the Australian Geography Teachers Association (AGTA) to two school education related recommendations put forward in "Geography: Shaping Australia's Future" (National Committee for Geographical Sciences, 2018). The recommendations are: The National Committee for Geographical Sciences and AGTA write…

The article outlines ways that teachers could use the content in Biomes and Food Security unit in the Australian curriculum, and its state and territory versions, to encourage their students to engage with higher order thinking. It first briefly discusses how to describe and classify higher-order thinking and argues that concepts are central to…

New technologies are changing the ways that children navigate, find places, make and use maps, and explore the world. This is the geospatial revolution. Children live in a world of rapid technological innovation bringing new opportunities for cognitive development in school geography. Geography learning is an important component of primary school…

This paper describes the results of an action research project undertaken as a partnership between Macquarie University and Geography teachers from an independent school in regional New South Wales (NSW), Australia. The project focused on the teaching of river landforms and processes, a component of the Biophysical Interactions topic in the NSW…