Geographic Education Research Paper

Both geography education and geographic education must be distinguished from the geography of education. As a major sector of the modern economy, the education system employs significant numbers of people and involves substantial capital investments in terms of school buildings, university and college campuses, buses, computers, textbooks, etc. The geography of education is concerned with understanding the spatial organization of the education system. It encompasses, for example, the relationships between patterns of tax revenues and levels of education expenditures, the diffusion of colleges and universities, the optimal design of bus routes to link students with schools, and the equity and efficiency of the provision of education to different socioeconomic and/or racial and ethnic groups. The focus is on understanding the spatial manifestation of the K-22 education system as part of the infrastructure of society.

Although an understanding of the educational infrastructure is not part of geography education as such, the state does have a major impact on the nature of geography education. In the USA, for example, the fundamental belief is that education is best controlled at a local, sub-state level. In Britain, and in France to an even greater degree, education control is more strongly vested in the national government. The ideological and structural differences between decentralized and centralized systems affect the nature of the curriculum, the training of teachers, the selection of educational materials, and the relative emphases on geography education.

1. The Nature And Process Of Geography Education

Geography education is concerned with fostering an understanding of the domain of geographic knowledge (its subject matter content, skills, and perspectives). The intent is not necessarily to produce geographers as such but to provide the essential geographic knowledge and skills for an educated person.

1.1 The Nature Of Geography

As the science of space and place on the earth’s surface, geography seeks to describe and explain the distribution, pattern, and nature of places and regions as seen at scales ranging from the local through to the global. The understanding of places and regions is set in multiple contexts: spatial, environmental, and temporal. The character of places and regions is seen as shaped by the interrelationships between physical phenomena, such as climate, terrain, the hydrologic cycle, biosystems, etc., and human phenomena, such as demographic characteristics, economic functioning, culture, politics, urbanization, etc. The shaping process is understood in a variety of ways, in terms of:

(a) the coalescence of physical and human phenomena to create the particular character of a place (e.g., local topography, microclimates, level of urbanization, ethnic composition, etc.);

(b) the impacts of global environmental and economic changes on local places (e.g., economic restructuring in labor-intensive industries, with the loss of local employment to cheaper ‘offshore’ production facilities); and

(c) the interdependencies between places on local, regional, and global scales (e.g., chemicals in runoff from farms in upstream areas polluting regional water tables and watersheds).

Therefore, the focus of modern geography is on understanding the evolving character and organization of places and regions on the earth’s surface. Geography’s approach is distinguished by (a) a sensitivity to context, (b) an appreciation of interconnections between spatial patterns and processes, (c) an emphasis on understanding systemic interrelationships at different spatial scales, and (d) an awareness of the reciprocal relations between physical and human systems.

The skills necessary for geographic understanding are of three types. There are general problem-solving or critical thinking skills which ask and answer geographic questions by means of acquiring, organizing, and analyzing geographic information. There is the use of broadly applicable methods such as spatial analysis (quantitative and qualitative), geographic information systems (GIS), field methods, and cartography. Finally, there is the application of discipline-specific technologies such as satellite image interpretation, computer-based geographic visualization, and global positioning systems (GPS). Perspectives in geography start with the essential spatial and ecological perspectives and have been extended to include, for example, feminist, historical, economic, social and critical theoretic, and humanist perspectives.

1.2 The Process Of Geography Education

The process of geography education involves the teaching and learning of geography in formal (e.g., preschool, school, college) and informal (e.g., familial, societal, workplace) contexts. Ideally, the process is lifelong in the context of an individual person— preschool, K-12, and perhaps beyond into higher education (13–16 or even 17–22) and the workplace— and continuous in the context of developments in the discipline of geography. In practice, however, there have been significant historical changes in:

(a) the ages at which geography education has been offered;

(b) its links to other components of the formal education system (e.g., geography as a standalone or as an infused subject);

(c) the role of the state vs. informal organizations in developing materials, training teachers, and setting the educational agenda; and

(d) geography’s role in facilitating societal imperatives (e.g., support for exploration and imperialism, mass education, and the development of workforce skills). The field of geography itself has also changed its emphasis on and approaches to geographic education.

2. Approaching The History Of Geography Education

Livingstone (1992) characterized the history of geography as a ‘contested enterprise.’ His strategy for ‘telling geography’s story’ was to focus on the ‘intellectual and social context within which geographical knowledge was produced’ (Livingstone 1992, p. 23). If we affix ‘re’ to ‘produced,’ then we can also tell the story of geography education.

While the production and reproduction of knowledge are necessarily linked, they do not move in some elegant pas de deux. The field of geography—the social organizations by which domain knowledge is generated, preserved, and transmitted—is complex. As a discipline, geography has an existence as an academic and as a popular subject, the latter exemplified by the activities of the National Geographic Society, which at first were confined to the USA but now have an increasingly international reach. The two parts of the discipline are characterized by approaches, agendas, and audiences that are more often competitive rather than complementary. Moreover, internal, disciplinary views and external, societal views of the purpose and value of geography are different and sometimes at odds with one another. Superimposed on these differences are the valuations placed by professional geographers on the roles for geography education.

3. Geography Education As A Contested Enterprise

The history of geography education is also a contested enterprise. It has been shaped by complex interactions among a variety of factors:

(a) individual and societal valuations of geographic knowledge;

(b) the current state and past history of geography as a discipline (in terms of dominant approaches, concepts, models, and theories);

(c) the state of the formal education system (in terms of societal goals, physical infrastructure, resources, teacher training, textbooks, etc.); and

(d) the state of pedagogical theory and practice in education in general, and geography in particular. While all of these factors vary across time and space, they coalesce into changing national approaches to geography education.

4. The Rationales For Geography Education

As with many disciplines, the rationale for the importance of geographic knowledge has been intertwined with the definition of an educated person. That definition has been subject to changes in the nature of geographic understanding, and to the shifting emphases of the larger projects of society.

While it is impossible to unearth the roots of geography education, we can trace the emergence of some of the rationales for expecting people to understand geography. In late-Medieval Europe, for example, one grounding of formal education was in the teaching and learning of the seven sciences of the artes liberalis: the quadrivium or advanced division (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy) and the trivium or lower division (grammar, logic, and rhetoric).

5. Two Geographic Themes

Geography, as in knowledge of the location and character of places and the creation and use of maps, fell partially within the rubrics of geometry and astronomy. Place knowledge was an expected and necessary part of the knowledge base of an educated person and map use was a valuable practical skill in travel, navigation, surveying, business, warfare, and diplomacy. As both foundational knowledge and applied skill, geography therefore had elements of what we would today recognize as a liberal arts subject and as a science discipline, thus accounting for the discipline’s varied placement within the college and faculty structures of universities in North America.

The two themes of foundational knowledge and applied skill are interwoven throughout the history of geography education in all countries. On the one hand, geography education is seen as essential to the project of creating an educated person, whether that project is couched in terms of (a) a broad liberal education, (b) citizenship education (in local, patriotic and national, or world contexts as expressed in the slogan ‘think globally, act locally’), or (c) geographic literacy (e.g., reading and understanding the contents of a newspaper). Participation in local community affairs, voting, and support for national and increasingly international policies all depend upon a level of geographic literacy. On the other hand, geography education is seen as providing essential skills for operating in society in general (e.g., mapreading skills) and for participating in the workforce in particular (e.g., using geographic information systems). Careers in planning, business, and government agencies all depend upon significant levels of geographic skill.

5.1 Geography As Foundational Knowledge

The foundational knowledge approach to geography education has many variants. Geographic knowledge is seen as a way of counteracting and overcoming the natural and/or socially induced human tendencies towards egocentrism, parochialism, and ethnocentrism. Knowledge of the diversity of patterns of human occupancy of the earth’s surface reduces the chances of privileging one’s own place in the world and increases the appreciation of cultural diversity and human creativity. Similarly, geographic knowledge underpins an understanding of physical environments, especially important as those environments are under threat from human-induced changes at local and global level. It can reinforce an understanding of the interdependency between human and physical systems. Geographic knowledge is seen as important for the teaching of other subjects, especially history, sociology, anthropology, economics, business, and political science. Without an appreciation of the intersections between space and place and between environment and society, the subject matter of those other disciplines cannot be appropriately grounded and understood. And finally, geographic knowledge need not be seen as exclusively instrumental or utilitarian: ‘(t)he power and beauty of geography lie in seeing, understanding, and appreciating the web of relationships among people, places, and environments’ (Geography Education Standards Project 1994, p. 3).

5.2 Geography As An Applied Skill

The grounding of geography education in skills also has multiple bases. The science, art, and craft of cartography has been fundamental to many social projects, including surveying, documenting land ownership systems, exploration and navigation, colonization and military conquest, regional and local planning, and environmental science. As technologies for data gathering (e.g., satellite remote sensing), ensuring data accuracy (e.g., global positioning systems), data processing (e.g., GIS), and displaying geospatial data (e.g, geo-visualization tools) have become pervasive, so too have been the needs for geographically educated people to produce and interpret an increasing range of graphic displays. Those technologies and their products are central to the daily operations of government (local and national), the military, business and logistics, international politics, and so on. For example, knowledge of the spatial structure of national and world economies, together with the tools of spatial analysis, are seen as essential for individual participation in, and national success in, the business of the increasingly interdependent global economy.

Geography education has, therefore, been based on an intermixing of four principal rationales:

(a) the existential value of understanding one’s place in the world;

(b) the ethical imperative of appreciating the fragile human and physical systems upon which we depend;

(c) the intellectual power of understanding the interplay between two pairs of ideas—space and place, and environment and society—in shaping the patterns of the earth’s surface; and

(d) the utilitarian motivation of using geography to solve individual and societal problems. These rationales have motivated the process of geography education and have been differentially emphasized during the history of geography education (Douglass 1998).

6. Geography Education: A History

While there had been a strong classical tradition of geography in the eastern Mediterranean as far back as 2000 BC, the efflorescence of geography was contemporaneous with the so-called Age of Exploration and the origins of the Scientific Revolution beginning in fifteenth-century Europe. Built on the maps and texts surviving from the Greek, Egyptian, Roman, and Arab cultures, geography was both a statement about the world and a way of recording the new information about diverse places. Maps were both tools for navigation and means of recording the results of travels. Texts captured descriptions of the location and properties of places encountered.

6.1 Varenius And The Two Geographies

These two roles of maps and texts are a convenient starting point in an account of the history of geography education. In 1649, Bernhardus Varenius (Bernhard Varens), a German doctor living in the Netherlands, published Descriptio Regni Japoniae et Siam, followed in 1650 by his Geographia Generalis. In the latter work Varenius systematized an understanding of the logic of geography, distinguishing between general and special geography. Although the terms were not original to Varenius, his statement of the distinction was crucial to the development of geography as a discipline in general and to the history of geography education in particular.

General (or universal) geography was explanatory in nature, seeking to understand the patterns and processes of the world via general (or natural) laws. Echoing the links of geography to geometry and astronomy in the quadrivium, general geography was linked to the ‘mixed’ (or applied) mathematics. Its focus on the terrestrial globe was paralleled by astronomy’s focus on the celestial globe. General geography sought to understand global patterns of climate, topography, hydrography, etc., by means of forces and mechanisms (the laws of motion, heat, erosion, etc.). It moved from global explanations to accounts of regional variations, emphasized physical over human phenomena, and incorporated both geodesy and cartography.

Special geography was descriptive in nature, seeking to depict the characteristics of particular places. Although Varenius did not offer a detailed description of special geography in Geographia Generalis, his outline description matched the contents of his earlier Descriptio Regni Japoniae et Siam. While the basis for general geography was demonstration from general laws, special geography derived from experience, systematized in terms of the terrestrial (physical) and human properties of places.

While there is a necessary link between special and general geography, there is also a recognition that general geography is more challenging, more intellectually demanding, and therefore in a sense, more advanced than special geography. General geography seats the discipline squarely within the tradition of natural philosophy and eventually the mathematical and empirical sciences. Varneius’ work was influential throughout Europe for over two centuries (used by Newton in England and Kant in Germany, for example) and in the USA (Warntz 1964, 1982).

For geography education, Varenius’ distinction between general and special geography establishes the two tracks along which geographic teaching and learning developed. It also helps to account for the trajectory of success, failure, and eventual re-emergence of geography instruction in educational systems. The book itself is important for two additional reasons. First, Varenius was concerned with restoring what he felt was a needed balance between general and special geography, the balance being decidedly in favor of special geography. To Varenius the imbalance meant that students were ignorant of the foundations of their discipline and this lack of attention to general geography placed into question the status of geography as a science. Second, the book was written as a textbook for advanced students, not for scholars. The changing balance between special and general geography, the relative intellectual status of the discipline, and the role of textbooks are themes that recur through the history of geography education.

From the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, geography was part of both the school and college education systems in Europe and North America. In the USA, for example, admission to the colonial colleges was based in part upon knowledge of geography. It was expected that school and college students would know about the world in general and their national worlds in particular, and that they would have some minimal understanding of the maps and globes which were instruments for conveying and using knowledge about the world. Geography instruction incorporated both general and special elements, although there was a preponderance of the latter in schools and the former in college. Geography was a standalone subject in the curriculum of schools and the faculty of colleges and universities. It was supported by a rich infrastructure of textbooks, atlases, wall maps, and globes. Geography instruction led, for example, to new tools. In England in the 1760s, John Spilsbury, a London mapmaker, created ‘dissected maps’ as a way of teaching geography. In an interesting twist, dissected maps became jigsaw puzzles, a major source of entertainment named after the tool used for their construction, and they lost their meaning as a tool of geographic instruction.

During the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, geography instruction responded to larger societal projects. In European countries, the twin forces of nationalism and imperialism reshaped territorial relationships throughout the continent and the world. Geography became a way of inculcating an understanding of national identity and international aspirations. Thus there are numerous literary allusions to children being forced to learn maps of the British Empire in which imperial possessions were boldly portrayed in vast expanses of red. Children were subjected to a world being carved into places that were named and owned, demarcated by sharp lines and differentiated by rich physical and human detail. This detail was the cumulative result of several centuries of exploration, conquest, colonization, and settlement. There was also an ideology for structuring this world understanding. Places were ordered as being populated by savages, barbarians, half-civilized, and civilized and enlightened people. Progression along this typology was allegedly a response to the civilizing influences of European society. This ideology was the basis for many eighteenth and nineteenth century textbooks and atlases.

In the USA, two interlocking forces shaped the nature of geography education and led to its gradual demise as a school subject during the first half of the twentieth century. The first force was universal or mass education, a force which applied equally to European societies. The second force was the expansion and integration of the national territory. As the nation grew in size and complexity, there were increasing demands that students should understand the geography of the emerging nation. Universal education brought with it pressures towards access for all students and the fostering of a spirit of national identity. Political independence meant also independence in terms of what was taught and the material on which teaching was based. All of these imperatives lead to an increasing focus on special geography, with the USA being the focal point of the world view and with a sense that understanding one’s own country was essential, easy, and accessible to all (Bruckner 1999).

Beginning in 1784, Jedidiah Morse wrote a series of textbooks that shaped American school geography. An 1814 edition was entitled Geography Made Easy and it was developed ‘for the use of schools and academies in the United States of America.’ These books spawned a series of progenitors throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The texts made all places, but especially the nation and the student’s state of residence, seem special and perhaps unique. Children learned by rote, working from the ubiquitous trio of the globe, the textbook, and the wall map of the world. As geography, particularly special geography, literally became easy, it lost respect in the eyes of many in the academy. While the knowledge gained was useful and even essential, it did not challenge children’s minds, except in the most trivial sense of factual learning.

From the middle of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, major geographic scholars were centrally involved in the process of geography education at all levels, K-12 included. For example, William Morris Davis in the USA and Halford MacKinder in the UK exemplified a seamless approach to the development of geography as an academic discipline and as a school subject. In both countries, there were organizations, the National Council for Geographic Education and the Geographical Association, whose primary function was the fostering of geography education in society. The National Geographic Society pursued its goal of increasing and diffusing geographic knowledge for mass audiences in as many countries as possible. Geography remained a popular subject, as exemplified by two bestselling books. V. M. Hillyer’s (1929) A Child’s Geography of the World and Hendrik van Loon’s (1932) Van Loon’s Geography remained in print for over 20 years and both were translated into many languages. There was a popular interest in geographic knowledge and therefore modest levels of support for K-12 geography instruction.

7. Geography Education In The Modern Era

During the middle to late twentieth century, geography education played different roles in different countries. In the UK, it remained a standalone subject that was part of the curriculum at all school levels and it was available as one of the Ordinary and Advanced level exit exams in high school. In this context, geography was traditionally grouped with the arts rather than the sciences. In both France and Germany, geography also played a comparably steady but modest role in the school curriculum. In the USA, geography languished at all school levels. The integrity of the discipline as a whole was destroyed as a consequence of being split apart as a subject. Human geography was subsumed within the social studies and physical geography within the earth sciences. These curricular emphases were mirrored in the structure of the education training system, with preservice teachers being explicitly trained as specialists in geography in many countries but not in the USA. In all cases, geography was taught as a cross between knowledge of the fundamental properties of places and regions in the world and, to some limited extent, a set of practical skills (e.g., map and atlas use, survey methods, fieldwork, etc.)

There are three principal frameworks underpinning the scope and sequence of geography in the K-12 curriculum. Curricula were place, scale, or concept-based. The place-based curriculum structure is the oldest structure, dating back to the eighteenth century focus on special geography. Variously known as the ‘capes and bays’ or the ‘principal products of Peru’ approach, it employed a simple classificatory framework to capture the characteristics of places around the world. Students learned about the location, boundaries, physical geography, and human geography of places, often in a rote fashion and using simple maps and atlases. In effect, younger children learned less, as in fewer and simpler things, and older children learned more, as in more detail, about the world. Geography education became an A to Z world tour, organized around continents, countries, and regions.

The scale-based structure is also known as the expanding environments or expanding communities approach. It begins in the early grades with a focus on the familiar and on the local world of the child, progressing to increasingly distant places with increasing age of the students. The local-to-global progression is premised on teaching about what is readily accessible to the understanding of children at different ages and levels of cognitive understanding. The third approach is concept-based, developing a systematic understanding of sets of concepts that can be applied to a range of spatial contexts at different scales. Geography is seen as a way of asking and answering questions about what is where in the world, and about why and how it got there.

These three curricular structures fall loosely into a historical sequence, if not progression, and reflect significant changes in the view of the discipline of geography. The essential transition is from seeing geography as a property of the world (the geography of a place) to seeing geography as a perspective on the world, as a way of understanding patterns and processes on the earth’s surface. In the place-based approach, there are lists of things to be known about the world; in the concept-based approach, there are alternative ways of knowing about the world. Beginning with the scale-based approach, there is a sense of active involvement with the world, an involvement based on field trips, on maps as tools for recording and investigating places and environments, and students as explorers and creators of their own understanding.

Underpinning these three approaches are, therefore, approaches to child development. Many of the great educational theorists (Pestalozzi, Montessori, Piaget, etc.) treat issues that are central to the child’s under- standing of the world, although they do not necessarily do so within the formal domain of geography. Thus, for example, Piaget discusses the development of spatial understanding, the sense of nation, the under- standing of basic physical phenomena (e.g., clouds, rain, etc.) and he makes use of maps and spatial models in his research designs. Geography education, while not necessarily basing its approaches explicitly on such theorists, is of necessity informed by their ideas.

In the early to middle 1980s, there was a resurgence of interest in many countries in the success—and often failure—of education systems in generating knowledgeable and competent students. The context for this interest was the intersection among several factors, including the effects of globalization on national economies, the desire to remain competitive in a rapidly changing world, and the increasing demands for technical skills in the workforce. As typified in the seminal US report A Nation At Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983), there were significant concerns about the structure of education in terms of teacher training, teacher support, curricula, textbooks, assessment, accountability, etc.

In the case of geography, the focus, especially in the USA, was on unacceptably low levels of geographic literacy among recent high school graduates. International comparisons showed relatively low levels of geographic literacy in a range of countries, but the performance of American students was particularly disappointing. As a consequence of the renewed national interest in education, geography education became the focus of attention from national and private organizations in many countries.

That attention paralleled national concerns about the knowledge and skills of school graduates and it led to a normative focus on what students should know and be able to do. The focus gave rise to national documents specifying the content of the curriculum at various grades and/or ages. Often these documents specified learning outcomes that were expected of students and therefore the documents became the basis for the assessment of student learning. In the case of geography, both the UK and the USA produced national guidelines (or standards).

8. The Current State Of Geography Education

Geography education remains a contested enterprise. As K-12 educational systems place an increasing emphasis on immediately relevant skills— mathematics, writing, and to some extent science— other subjects are of necessity given less attention in terms of time in the classroom, teacher training, material support, and access to computing resources. Where geography education is infused in the curriculum, this lack of attention is a serious problem and results in geography being squeezed out or at best subsumed within another subject such as history. While there is public support for a level of geographic knowledge, that support is often in terms of place location knowledge, a necessary but insufficient base for geography education.

Geography education is changing in ways that move it away from the negative image associated with ‘old-fashioned’ rote learning of geographic facts. Several transitions are underway. The first is a recognition that the process of geography education can be set within a novice–expert framework. This entails understanding the different types of knowledge that underpin increasing expertise: (a) declarative or propositional (e.g., factual and conceptual understanding), (b) procedural (e.g., how to perform some operation), and (c) metacognitive (when, where, and why to link facts, concepts, and operations to answer geographic questions). It involves understanding the organization of the mental models that children develop (e.g., Earth–Sun relations, the water cycle, urban growth), the ways in which different skills are available at different ages (or cognitive developmental levels), and the role of peers and teachers in supporting the student’s developing understanding (Downs 1994).

A second transition is a switch from rote learning to active, inquiry-based learning. Geography becomes a way of finding out about the world rather than simply a set of things to be known about the world. Computers and geographic databases allow students to ask and answer geographic questions for them- selves. A third transition is from tests to authentic assessments. Assessment is built into the structure of the ongoing learning process and is focused on problems and situations that are likely to be encountered in real-world contexts. Students can demonstrate their developing skills by building portfolios of their work.

9. The Future Of Geography Education

All of these changes in geography education mirror changes that are occurring in the nature of education in general. The short-term future of geography education lies in the successful linking of the case for geography education with the increasing capacity to do geography. In the same way that geography was fundamental to past societal projects (e.g., exploration and imperialism), it is also fundamental to the current development of an information society. Much of the data that is available can be assigned geospatial coordinates and therefore it can be handled efficiently and effectively via geographic information systems. The larger parent field of geographic information science requires an understanding of maps and graphics, of space and place, of the interactions between environment and society. Those understandings, while not exclusive to geography, are central to the subject and can be taught through geography education. Given the growing importance of information science and technology to all aspects of modern society and economy, there is a potential to reestablish an essential role for geography education in the contest for space—and time—in the educational system (Rediscovering Geography Committee 1997).

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