This book offers a comparative analysis of alternative education in the UK, focusing on learning spaces that cater for children and young people. It constitutes one of the first book-length explorations of alternative learning spaces outside mainstream education - including Steiner, human scale and forest schools, care farms and homeschooling.Based on original research with teachers, parents and young people at over 50 learning spaces, Geographies of alternative education demonstrates the importance of a geographical lens for understanding alternative education. In so doing, it develops contemporary theories of autonomy, emotion/affect, habit, intergenerational relations and life-itself. The book will appeal to academics and postgraduates in the fields of geography, sociology, education and youth studies. Given ongoing concerns about the state's role in providing children's education, and an increase in the number of alternative education providers in the UK and elsewhere, the book also highlights several critical questions for policy makers and practitioners.

This book explores the complex and various forms that privatization of education takes on a global scale at different ages of schooling. Through the spread of neoliberal policies in education both in the global North and the global South, the book suggests that this process is leading to new forms of schooling and socio-spatial dynamics linked to the creation of increasingly competitive school markets. The book highlights some of the main issues that such competition generates by focusing on the acceleration of the segregative processes on one hand but also on the alternatives that are emerging regarding this global context on the other hand. It considers processes of domination, hegemony, but also exclusion and segregation, eventually exploring contradictions inherent to societies. It presents innovative empirical and conceptual research by international scholars from the fields of social geography, sociology, history and demography in the United States, Lebanon, France, Afghanistan and Chile, thereby transcending disciplinary boundaries. Developed in under or unexplored contexts, the book broadens the reflection to social representations, individual and collective strategies, adaptation, innovation and also resistances.

Alternative education caters and cares for students whose regular schools have failed and excluded them. Fifty years of international research reports that alternative settings are characterised by close and powerful staff–student relationships, a curriculum which is relevant, engaging and meaningful, and the strong sense of agency afforded young people by the opportunity to make decisions. Together, these three practices produce increased life chances for alternative education participants. However, despite these apparent successes, alternative education seems to have had little impact on mainstream schools. This collection of papers addresses the important question – what might regular schools and teachers learn about socially just pedagogies from alternative education practices? In providing answers to this question, authors interrogate the taken-for-granted wisdom about alternative education while also taking account of ongoing policy shifts, differing locations and populations, and persistent and intersecting patterns of raced, classed and gendered inequalities. They draw on a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to interrogate the ways in which alternative schools and alternative education both challenge and legitimate the kinds of schooling most of us expect for our own and other people's children. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Critical Studies in Education.

This open access book explores the complex relationship between schooling as a set of practices embedded in educational institutions and their specific spatial dimensions from different disciplinary perspectives. It presents innovative empirical and conceptual research by international scholars from the fields of social geography, pedagogy, educational and social sciences in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Czechia, Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, Norway and Canada. The book covers a broad range of topics, all examined from a spatial perspective: the governance of schooling, the transition processes of and within national school systems, the question of small schools in peripheral areas as well as the embeddedness of schooling in broader processes of social change. Transcending disciplinary boundaries, the book offers deep insights into current theoretical debates and empirical case studies within the broad research field encompassing the complex relationship between education and space.

This book explores the growth of ‘character education’ in schools and youth organisations over the last decade. It delves into historical and contemporary debates through a geopolitical lens. With a renewed focus on values and virtues such as grit, gumption, perseverance, resilience, generosity, and neighbourliness, this book charts the re-imagining and re-fashioning of a ‘character agenda’ in England and examines its multiscalar geographies. It explores how these moral geographies of education for children and young people have developed over time. Drawing on original research and examples from schools, military and uniformed youth organisations, and the state-led National Citizen Service, the book critically examines the wider implications of the ‘character agenda’ across the UK and beyond. It does so by raising a series of questions about the interconnections between character, citizenship, and values and highlighting how these moral geographies reach far beyond the classroom or campsite. Offering critical insights on the roles of character, citizenship and values in modern education, this book will be of immense value to educationists, teachers and policymakers. It will appeal students and scholars of human geography, sociology, education studies, cultural studies and history.

This collection of original chapters brings together cutting-edge research on informal education - that is, learning practices that emphasise dialogue and learning through everyday life. For the first time, it highlights the way in which geography matters to informal education practices. Through a range of examples from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and from a range of geographical contexts, the authors explore the relationship between history, geography and practice in the field of informal education. Case studies include youth work, Scouting, Guiding, Care Farms, youth music programmes and the use of online/information technologies. This book will be of interest to geographers and sociologists of education, childhood and youth scholars. It also provides an engaging resource and collection of case studies for educators, youth workers and other professionals who work with young people.

Geography of Education sets out the scope of this emergent, interdisciplinary field. It illustrates the essential affinity of geographical and educational studies, by emphasising the geographical factors influencing formal education systems and other forms of knowledge transfer. Colin Brock begins by arguing the theoretical synergy that exists between the nature of both geography and educational studies as disciplines. This is then exemplified by an analysis of the emergence of systems of schooling under the influence of religious, political and economic forces. The author also considers informal and non-formal modes of education, and argues that the huge diversity of such provision creates a rich resource for research into geographies of education. In the final chapters the author turns his attention to the role of cyberspace, which has its own geography, in learning, and considers education as a form of humanitarian response to issues of environmental sustainability. By bringing together a wide range of themes and topics relating to both education and geography, Colin Brock argues that the geographical approach should inform the evolution of all types of educational provision around the world.

This book examines the intersections between children, education and geography. With a particular focus on children’s geographies and geographies of education, the book draws upon cutting-edge research to consider how geographical education can be enhanced through increased engagement with these fields. The book is underpinned by the position that the lives of children and young people are inherently geographical, as are educational institutions, systems and processes. The volume explores the ways in which the diverse relationships between children, education and geography can enrich research and work with, and for, children and young people. Chapters in this book consider how in/justices are (re)produced through education. Chapters also explore how insights generated by thinking in, and across, geography and education can be used to support and empower young people in both formal education and in their everyday lives. Ultimately, this book is written for children and young people. Not as the readership, but as people, often marginalised in decision making at a variety of scales in education, and who, we contend should be at the heart of all educational thinking. The book is of value to undergraduate and post graduate students interested in geography education and children’s geographies, as well as teachers of geography, both new and experienced.

This volume presents different conceptual and theoretical frameworks as well as research methods that have helped educational researchers to study emotions. It includes innovative approaches that push the methodological boundaries that have served educational researchers until now and proposes new ways of researching emotions in educational contexts. In particular, this edited volume provides a historical frame for studying emotions. It connects theoretical/epistemological views with choice of research methods and describes specific methods helpful in doing research on emotions as they are grounded in different theoretical and disciplinary traditions such as psychology, philosophy, sociology, history, political science, cultural studies, and feminist studies. Finally, it appreciates the contextual and international dimensions of studying emotions in education and contributes to ongoing debates about the implications of our methodological choices for understanding emotion in education. This combination of variety, timeliness, potential for transformation of the field, and uniqueness make this a very valuable resource to introduce new scholars in the field alongside established scholars.

The Routledge Handbook of Methodologies in Human Geography is the defining reference for academics and postgraduate students seeking an advanced understanding of the debates, methodological developments and methods transforming research in human geography. Divided into three sections, Part I reviews how the methods of contemporary human geography reflect the changing intellectual history of human geography and events both within human geography and society in general. In Part II, authors critically appraise key methodological and theoretical challenges and opportunities that are shaping contemporary research in various parts of human geography. Contemporary directions within the discipline are elaborated on by established and emerging researchers who are leading ontological debates and the adoption of innovative methods in geographic research. In Part III, authors explore cross-cutting methodological challenges and prompt questions about the values and goals underpinning geographical research work, such as: Who are we engaging in our research? Who is our research ‘for’? What are our relationships with communities? Contributors emphasize examples from their research and the research of others to reflect the fluid, emotional and pragmatic realities of research. This handbook captures key methodological developments and disciplinary influences emerging from the various sub-disciplines of human geography.