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Sustainability of educational change: The role of social geographies

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Abstract

The paper examines the conceptual and strategicrole of social geographies in contributing toor undermining sustainable school improvement.It develops a four-fold definition ofsustainability as involving improvement overtime, within available or achievable resourcesthat does not impact negatively on thesurrounding environment and that promotesecological diversity and capacity more widely.A conceptual framework of social geographies isdeveloped along with its implications forsustainability. This analysis is then appliedto a further framework of seven strategicgeographies of educational change whichdeliberately try to arrange, order or exploitspace in particular ways to secure schoolchange. These are market geographies, networkgeographies, virtual geographies, geographiesof scaling up, standardized geographies,differential geographies and geographies ofsocial movements. The paper concludes byreviewing the other contributions to the volumeon the theme of social geographies ofeducational change, and describes the SpencerFoundation funded conference from which theysprang.

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Hargreaves, A. Sustainability of educational change: The role of social geographies. Journal of Educational Change 3, 189–214 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1021218711015

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