| Researching change and changing research in Geographical Education (2006) | |||||||||
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| A popular aphorism has it that the only constant in life is change and this is certainly true both spatially and temporally in geography and geographical education. However, it is also demonstrably true of research itself, whether applied to geographical education or any other aspect of life. Imre Lakatos (Lakatos, Feyerabend & Motterlini, 2000) thought of research in terms of programmes of investigation, and believed that such programmes could be compared according to their relative progression or degeneration, their coherence in mapping out future research, and their discovery of novel phenomena. However, it is often only in retrospect that we can judge the extent to which research in any area constitutes coherent programs of investigation, and one way in which this has been attempted has been to classify and evaluate published research studies. Since the mid-twentieth century, there have been a number of formal classifications of research in geographical education, the most recent being that by Foskett and Marsden (1998). As well as drawing together evidence of "programmes" emerging at the international level, these reviews are useful in consolidating the findings-to-date of research in specific aspects of geographical education while, from an historical perspective also reveal those aspects of the subject important to practitioners and researchers at particular periods, and show how the foci of research may change over time. | |||||||||
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