Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro
Department of Geography
State University of New York, New Paltz

Natural sciences typically enjoy generous institutional
support and are regarded as authoritative knowledge. At
the point of institutionalised knowledge distribution,
as with university classrooms, few challenges have been
mounted to the uncritical, if not reactionary, approaches
typifying the natural sciences. Recent feminist work
provides the only example of systematic and sustained
effort at overcoming this, but it scarcely questions the
power relations in which the sciences, and the making
of scientists, are embedded. An alternative curriculum
should therefore be developed and diffused that encourages
socially critical and contextualising understandings
of natural science and that promotes egalitarian principles,
in ways similar to Marxist-inspired radical
pedagogy. Through physical geography, geographers
are well situated to radicalise natural science education.
Kropotkin’s anarchist communist perspective already
provides a precedent. Its integration with feminist and
radical pedagogy provides one way that the content of
physical geography teaching curricula can be radicalised,
at least for college-level coursework in the US. To
illustrate how to accomplish this, I discuss the development
and application of a radical curriculum for an
introductory physical geography course.

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