Teachers envisioning future geography education at their schools

Abstract

One of the challenges of a geography teacher education program is preparing teachers for their leading roles in keeping geography education relevant for the young people of today. It is important to allow teachers to think about geography education and the future and to foster their curriculum-making competences. In a master course at Fontys University of Applied Sciences, geography teachers are encouraged to develop an informed vision of geography education. One of their assignments is to write an essay – based on both literature and practical research – about “what geography education should look like at their schools five years in the future”. We analysed these essays to understand teachers' ideal future images about geography education. For the analyses, we used two models of curriculum making. Most of the teachers express innovative ideas about classroom practice, how to stimulate student learning, and how to make geography lessons more interesting. They express responsibility for student learning. In addition to teachers' promising ideas about learning activities, it is far more difficult for them to adopt a clear vision of geography education and to reason from this vision. Making balanced proposals for future geography education using the different elements of creating a curriculum (aims, content, activities and assessment) is a big challenge and deserves specific attention during the master course.

Keywords:

• future image
• geography education
• curriculum making
• teacher education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In the first preparatory assignment, students must compare several current international curricula. The aim of this comparison is to broaden the students’ horizons related to geography education and to understand the specific what and why of geography education in neighbouring countries. The second preparatory assignment consists of evaluating the current geography-education situation at the student teachers’ schools. A checklist for school geography departments (Dawson, Lodge, & Roberts, 2004) containing several questions is used as an instrument to stimulate discussion among colleagues. The checklist includes questions about the content of the geography curriculum, the teaching and learning experience, enhancing the geography experience, promoting and marketing geography, geography teachers’ professional development and students as consumers of geography. Subsequently, the outcomes of the discussion had to be prioritised: three or four priorities had to be chosen and achievable goals for the forthcoming years had to be formulated.

The third preparatory assignment is a small-scale survey (Dawson et al., 2004) to obtain an impression of secondary-school students’ opinions of geography. In one or two classes, a questionnaire is presented to the students. Questions are asked about the difficulty of geography as a subject and whether the students think geography is interesting.