Geography forum
Why teach physical geography? |
hooligan
11-09-2007 08:49
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A teacher related a story about a lesson he taught in South London recently. The lesson was about cliff erosion, and the teacher had pointed out that rates of retreat on parts of Britain's coast were around 1 centimetre (or so) a year. The response of the class was to say something like, 'is that all? Now can we do something else?' This reminded me of an article that David Pepper wrote in 1985 entitled 'Why Teach Physical Geography?' It's an article that's well worth revisiting. Pepper argued (and here I'm summarising) that as taught in schools physical geography didn't allow pupils to set knowledge within the context of human society and problems; the physical environment was not seen as part of a system that also contains human society; students were encouraged to be analytic rather than synthetic, reductionist rather than holistic in their thinking; questions split knowledge into little 'bits' of information and there was little room for seeing how the bits fit together. Pepper noted: "You need neither technical skill nor critical faculty to do the paper; no comprehensive overview, no sense of 'relevance', application or synthesis, and above all no opinions about anything. All you need is the ability to memorise and recall textbook information and recognise what pages of the book you are being asked to regurgitate".
This is hard-hitting, and it's got me thinking how far things have changed, especially in the light of really exciting developments in how geographers now think about human-physical/nature-culture binaries (Whatmore's Hybrid Geographies comes to mind).
If we are going to realise the 'power of geography', we perhaps need some hard thinking about how we conceptualise aspects of the subject. What do people think?
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Re: Why teach physical geography? |
ciara
11-09-2007 08:52
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I don't suppose you have a reference for the David Pepper article? It sounds like it's just what I need!
I think recent situatuations like the earthquakes, flooding (in Boscastle), and the effects of global warming are good reasons to teach physical geography - if children think it's relevant to what is happening now, and can see the links between classroom learning and the real world, and then see how human geography affects it, it can be really empowering for them
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