Changing Horizons in Geography Education - HERODOT Network ...

The Relationship between Geography and Other Disciplinesin Spanish Higher EducationManuel MolláDepartment of Geography, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid,28009 Madrid, Spaine-mail: manuel.molla@uam.esAbstractThe training of the professional geographer is one of the great challenges before the convergencearising from the Bologna Agreement, in a Europe with borders that are more and morediluted. In this context, it is necessary to return to think how to develop studies of Geographythat give answer to this challenge. In recent years, Spanish Geography has moved away fromdisciplines that were their essential tools. In front of a formation more and more specialized,with a clear vocation towards the territorial planning, I believe that Geography must recoverits character and again places concepts in front of the technological development.Key words: Professional geographer, Bologna Agreement, interdisciplinary studiesThe process of “European convergence” for SpainIf we accept that modern Geography was born with Humboldt, we can also saythat Geography is the process of convergence of different disciplines and sciences.Without making history of the geographic thought, from that naturalistic birth ofGeography, and with figures of reference like Ratzel or Vidal de la Blache, to mentiononly two, Geography is elaborating a complex theoretical body of knowledge, inwhich one thing was always clear, or seemed to be, that Geography was a disciplineor science – I do not want to introduce that controversy, where geographic conceptsconverge – many of them adopted and transformed, and those that have arrivedfrom outside.Although Geography was born basically like a discipline into the hands of thenaturalists, the first class of Geography in Spain, appeared at the end of the 19 thCentury, in the faculties of Philosophy and Letters, and thus it has always stayedthere, although it is common that in the studies of Geology there are also classes ofphysical Geography, taught usually by geologists. During the second half of the 20 thCentury, university Geography education was changing (Valenzuela et al., 2004)from humanistic studies – where the future geographer had classes of Latin, Philosophy,Language, Literature, History, Geography… to studies much more specialized,as they are the new curricula of 1993, in which for the first time a Geography degreeappears with broken links to the other humanities.It is possible to say, in its institutional birth, the Spanish Geography left one of itsfundamental bases, the natural sciences, when it had been taken into the humanitiesschools. Even Physical Geography and its different branches (Geomorphology,174