Geographies of schooling

Abstract

Researchers across different disciplines have shown a growing interest in the spatial dimension of education and learning in its different forms. The number of publications on geography of education (Brock, 2016; Butler & Hamnett, 2007; Hanson Thiem, 2009; Symaco & Brock, 2016; Taylor, 2009), radical geographies of education (Mitchell, 2018), geography of education and learning (Holloway & Jöns, 2012), geographies of alternative education (Kraftl, 2013), as well as children’s and young people’s geographies (Holloway, Hubbard, Jöns, & Pimlott-Wilson, 2010) has risen considerably in human geography, especially in the Anglophone academia. Even researchers outside the discipline of geography have explored the spatial dimension of education and learning, for example those in educational sciences (Baroutsis, Comber, & Woods, 2017; Gulson & Symes, 2007; Nugel, 2016) and the sociology of education (Ares, Buendía, & Helfenbein, 2017; Löw & Geier, 2014). In German geography, the geography of education or Bildungsgeographie as a subdiscipline of social geography has a more than 50-year research tradition in terms of geographical research in educational institutions. It ranges from preschool education to tertiary and posttertiary education (Freytag & Jahnke, 2015; Freytag, Jahnke, & Kramer, 2015; Geipel, 1965; Meusburger, 1980, 1998). In French and Belgian social geography, already existing and more scattered research in the field has only recently begun to form a more institutionalized géographie de l’éducation (Wayens, Marissal, & Delvaux, 2017), whereas in other countries such research is currently in the process of institutionalization.