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Abstract: This paper uses Fraser''s (1999) concept of social justice as comprising both redistribution and recognition as a frame to interrogate two ‘Area-Based Curriculum’ projects running since 2008 in Manchester and Peterborough schools. It argues that historic concerns about working with ‘the local’ in cross-curricular activities has originated in a concern that such activities will fail to ‘redistribute’ powerful educational goods. This paper asks, however, whether such projects are also able to realise the goal that is frequently claimed for such projects, of recognising the diverse knowledge of students and their communities. Drawing on interviews, fieldnotes and observations across 8 schools, the paper argues that dominant geographical imaginations of the local area, social networks and material resources such as transport infrastructure, militate against the city being used within such projects as a resource for recognition. It argues also that the growth of a new ‘educational enhancement sector’ is beginning to mediate between schools and cities, producing the city in a form that is ‘fit for’ educational consumption. If area-based approaches are to achieve their goal of recognition, they need to be informed from the outset by theoretical frames that recognise knowledge as multiple, embedded and contextual. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper highlights the need for health geographers to consider the social and cultural geographies of who gets to train as a doctor. The paper presents a case study of a scheme intended to widen access to medical education for working class students from inner London. This work examines the role of local education markets and cultures of education in shaping the aspirations and achievements of potential future doctors. It employs ethnographic data to consider how ‘non-traditional’ learners acclimatise to medical school. Our findings indicate that the students who succeed best are those who can see themselves as belonging within the education system, regardless of their social and cultural background. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: School change is always local and dependent on the kinds of resources that are available. In this paper we explore the notion that knowledge is an important resources for vernacular educational reform. In order to explore this contention, we use the lens of cross-curricular changes undertaken by English schools in receipt of funding from Creative Partnerships. Our research identified three dominant change patterns – themes and topics in primary and secondary schools and skills-based subjects in secondary. Our study also showed that in making these changes schools had little recourse to their own collective histories or to international examples. We argue that, while policy was a significant delimiting factor on innovation, the problem-posing and solution-generating activities undertaken by schools may well have developed differently if a wider range of intellectual resources was available to them. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Researchers have been aware for some time of the differences between extensive and intensive quantities but the significance of these differences has not been recognized in mathematics curricula. In England children are provided with many opportunities in their first few years in school to manipulate, measure and reason about extensive quantities but have virtually no opportunity to do the same with intensive quantities. This paper contrasts extensive and intensive quantities and describes the obstacles to primary school children''s understanding of intensive quantities: the need to consider two variables simultaneously and the difficulty of understanding inverse relations between variables. Study 1 shows that children have considerable difficulty in using inverse relations reasoning. Study 2 shows that this form of reasoning is more difficult in the context of intensive than extensive quantities problems. Implications for education are considered and examples of experiences with intensive quantities that could provided in school are presented. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]