Geography teachers' concepts of working with Thinking Through Geography strategies – results of an empirical reconstructive study

ABSTRACT

The educational standards in geography in the German-speaking world separately refer to the areas of competence of judgment and evaluation and thus attach outstanding importance to reflective value orientation in geography classes. The tasks and challenges that arise from that for geography teachers will be investigated in a qualitative-reconstructive research project of responsive evaluation which form the basis for this article. The teachers worked with methods from the Thinking Through Geography approach by David Leat. For this purpose, the documentary method from Ralf Bohnsack was used as research instrument which is complex enough to capture and evaluate both explicit as well as implicit knowledge on the part of the teachers in complex situations of teaching and learning. With this study, greater attention is given to the question which type of support is required to make a change of teaching lasting and deep rather than superficial.

KEYWORDS:

• Thinking Through Geography
• geography teaching
• pedagogical content knowledge
• qualitative-reconstructive research
• documentary method

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.