Changing Horizons in Geography Education - HERODOT Network ...

This table shows the importance of Europe in the Middle school and High schoolcurriculum. It also emphasizes the coordinating effort that needs to take placebetween the three subjects (geography, history and civic education). However thevariety of the approaches used in these subjects and the weight of the contents arelikely to lead to repetition. To avoid the problem and lighten the teaching, the teachersrely on case studies. They enable the students to keep in contact with reality and helpthem to work from the environment they live in. The “Itinéraire De Découverte”(IDD) (Itinerary of Discovery) in Middle school as well as the “Travaux PersonnelsEncadrés” (TPE) (Monitored personal work) in secondary school also supports thatidea. In this special course time is dedicated to the Europe theme: the students mustcarry out research and must work on a personal or collective project.Handbooks are also tools that assist in building up citizenship studies. A studybased on the geography handbook of 1 ère (High school) shows how through images(maps, pictures of landscape, satellite images) the Europe subject is built up in geographywith “stereotype images of high-profile places, maps of Europe with indefinitefrontiers on the eastern side and clear cuts on the southern side” (Chevalier, 2001). Inspite of these homogeneous images which give a certain profile of Europe, and whichobviously provide an oriented knowledge of it, the author underlines that they offerdifferent possible interpretations of European people and places which contribute topluralistic vision of the European citizen who “craftsman is teacher” (ibid).Beyond those programs and the tools that are associated with it, European citizenshipbuilds itself up through the implementation of new processes. The mostimportant of these is undoubtedly linked to the “classe européenne” which had over160 000 students in 3600 sections in Middle and High schools in 2004. The Europeansections aim to provide teaching of a non-linguistic subject in a foreign language andthe deeper knowledge of a country’s culture. The European section exists in German,English, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, even if the English languageis predominant. They are normally started in the 4 e (12 years old) (exceptionally in6 e ,10 years old) and has since 2003 led to a baccalauréat (High school degree) witha European option. In this section, cultural activities and exchanges are organized,aiming at teaching a deeper knowledge of the civilization of the country where thelanguage studied is spoken.Those European sections, established in August 1992 are quite popular, all themore since the teaching proposed tends to appeal to good students and to create aselection process: the best students thus study less Latin than they did thirty years agobut study many languages and have European opportunities. The links with foreigncountries and the participation in projects like Comenius are encouraged.An experiment carried out at the University of Bordeaux at the beginning of acourse of regional geography testifies to the direct effects that these measures havehad on the orientation of the knowledge of the students. We asked the students tolocalize cities on an empty map of France and to indicate the name of the regionswhere these cities are. Besides this, we asked them to indicate on a clear map ofEurope the important cities and to identify the countries where they are. Generallythe localization of European towns is more precise than the one of French cities.244