Critical Approaches in Geography Education: A Critical Interpretative Synthesis Toward a Framework for Critical Geoliteracy

Although critical geography education has become visible, its relationship with geoliteracy remains conceptually unsettled. This critical interpretive synthesis examines recent literature published between 2016 and 2026, analyzing how critical geography education is conceptualized, which concepts and themes characterize critical approaches, and the extent to which these approaches engage with geoliteracy. The synthesis comprised 19 sources, including peer-reviewed studies and grey literature. Findings reveal that critical geography education is shaped by overlapping frameworks, while across the corpus, engagement with geoliteracy was mostly implicit, while explicit critical geoliteracy frameworks were absent.