Changing Horizons in Geography Education - HERODOT Network ...

esult is that geography has a dubious identity in the media which is to a large extentdominated by TV and press in the capital. At the University of Bergen the Departmentof Geography is located in Faculty of Social Science but educates candidatesup to MA and PhD levels in both human, environmental and physical geography. InBergen there is also teaching of economic geography at the Norwegian High Schoolof Business Economy (NHH). At NTNU University in Trondheim Department ofGeography is located at the Faculty of Social Sciences and gives education up to MAand PhD levels in human and environmental geography.In the recent decades Norwegian geography has lacked the strong iconoclasts thatattracted attention to Swedish geography; the small number of university teachershave fought to cover the broad canvas of geography themes in total and to makethis teaching attractive to the students that have enrolled. In Bergen we have thestrange situation that social anthropology has double the number of undergraduatestudents as geography, whereas on the other hand geography offers twice as manyundergraduate courses as the social anthropologists. In addition to the basic coursesin human, environmental and physical geography we also are responsible for coursesin local and regional planning and environmental science, plus of course GIS. Theheavy teaching engagement is a burden for academic publication activity, but infact also leads to a situation where students continue to MA when they first enrol ingeography. University teachers have not had any possibility to influence the situationof the discipline in the high schools. Geography still exists as a separate disciplinewith 2 teaching hours per week in the second year at high school. But 10 years agowe had 3 hours per week.The school curriculum has been changed a number of times in the last decades;the political leaders have in all cases very little understanding of what knowledgeand skills the discipline can provide for the youngsters. And it has been very difficultfor the few active geographers to reach the decision making bodies in an effectiveway. The secretaries of state for education have been some rather strong personalitieswith virtually no knowledge of geography as a learning instrument.Reasons for the differences in the status of geographyAlthough the presentation given above on the status of geography in Norway andother countries at the same economic and development level is rather scanty andincomplete, I hope it may give some basis for curiosity and reflections. When wenow set up some hypotheses that, at least in part, may explain the differences, wemust realise that it is impossible to test them in a scientific way. One reason is thelack of comparable data, the other that most hypotheses are of a kind that could onlybe evaluated by historical and qualitative reasoning. The set of hypotheses are:1. The status of geography in a country is directly correlated to the position of geographyin the school curriculum.2. The status of geography is dependent upon how early it was institutionalised, i.e.when a university degree in the discipline was required to teach geography in highschool.141