Changing Horizons in Geography Education - HERODOT Network ...

Exciting geography! What does this mean?Exciting may signify several things. In the Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionaryof Current English (2000), we can find the following:Exciting: adj. = causing great interest or excitement. Interest: i) Wanting to know more= the feeling that you have when you want to know or learn more about sb/sth; ii) attraction= the quality that sth has when it attracts sb’s attention or makes them want to knowmore about itExcite: i) to make sb feel very pleasure, interested or enthusiastic, especially about sth thatis going to happen; ii) to make sb feel a particular emotion or react in a particular wayOxford Advanced Learners Dictionary of Current English (2000), Sixth EditionIn this context what does exciting geography mean and what can we do to makegeography an exciting subject in our schools? In fact it may signify many things,even if our thinking is composed by multiple convictions, intuitions, and doubts. Perhapsit is not too controversial to state that Geography will be exciting if it manages to beinteresting to students, feeding and stimulating their interest in knowing more about theworld, whether we are talking about their neighbourhood or the most distant country,and so helping them to solve real-life problems.In my opinion, to make geography an exciting topic, it will imply several changes,namely:(i) Turn geography into an open window for knowledge of the world around us,and the learning experience into an adventure. To attain such a goal we need tointervene at two levels: the level of substantive and procedure contents, on one hand,and learning/teaching methods, on the other hand. As to content, it is necessary toanchor teaching in the learning of basic concepts, and key questions in which geographybuilds its identity (Figure 1). In what concerns the methods, Saint-Exupéry(1946) shows us a possible way. In his book Le Petit Prince, this writer tells us aboutgeographers and explorers, making a clear distinction between them. The formerare concerned with the location of the most important elements of the planet Earth:oceans, rivers, cities, mountainsand deserts. The latter are mainlyconcerned with the discovery ofthose elements. So, even if we disagreewith the idea of geography ofthis writer, it seems that the best wayto involve students in the processof learning is to turn them intoexplorers. Explorers in the sense ofsomeone who tries to discover, whosearches for, examines or observesto understand the world and its problems.Allowing students to performthe role of explorers, teachers, notFigure 1. Key-questions and main concepts of geography18