Today was the first day of this year's Symposium of the Commission on Geographical Education of the International Geographical Union and the International Cartographic Association (IGU-CGE), which is being held in Brisbane.
the morning's keynote was delivered by Professor Rod Gerber, on the topic of 'an internationalised, globalised perspective on geographical education'.
Professor Gerber talked about eight so-called 'myths' put forward by the international geographical community. His contention was that these myths have limited our capacity to demonstrate how geographical education can be the effective medium for addressing major global issues. of particular interest to me were the myths that:
- children and adolescents learn in similar ways throughout the world (Prof Gerber reminded us of Rogoff's work on guided participation and situated learning as a refutation to this myth);
- geography teachers are prepared and supported in similar ways throughout the world (our attention was drawn to the so-called Bologna Agreement which was signed by member states of the European Union in 1999, and which commits them to the establishment of a European Higher Education Area by 2010); and that
- communications technologies enhance geographical education throughout the world. personally, i think that's a great way to start my presentation on podcasting, especially given the fact that this campus's wireless network is not open to conference attendees to use :-P
Later that morning, i attended Liz Taylor's talk on 'researching children's understandings of distant places'. Liz teaches at Cambridge. i chose to attend because of my own interest in spatial cognition among adolescents and novice geographers. straight off, Liz acknowledged the conceptual difficulty presented by the word 'distant'. she defined the 'distant place' as the place which a group judges to be distant in that it is outside their 'normal' experience and to visit it would involve a degree of travel which would be considered exceptional.
i like the fact that this definition introduces the dimension of the socially-constructed 'distant place', and also that it is scale-free.
Liz shared some of the work she's done with pupils using audio diaries, then went on to talk about three main strands of research into children's understandings of distant places, namely in terms of locational knowledge, perceptions and images, and attitudes. she also introduced four main methods through which such understandings could be researched: written, pictorial / diagrammatic, card-sorting, and oral. it's interesting to think about in which of these strands and methods my own doctoral research lies.
another talk close to the heart of my research interest in adolescent spatial cognition was given by Gale Olp Ekiss of the Arizona Geographic Alliance. she introduced the work of Wiegand, who has flagged that while much has been researched on how children read, interpret and use maps, there is a dearth of literature on how to design maps which promote map-reading and -interpretation skills, not to mention their use, among children. intriguingly, Wiegand recommends a dialogue between the map designer and the map reader around the continually evolving map. this has been elaborated upon by Lloyd, Rostkowska-Covington and Steinke (1996).
in the afternoon, i attended a talk by Sheri Ruegsegger. Sheri - who formerly started her career as a historian - teaches Advanced Placement Human Geography at the Perrydale High School in Oregon. an interesting thing she did was to pose her audience a few geographical questions. the most memorable was "why is it important to teach the concept of scale?"
thought-provoking indeed.
Clare Brooks, who's a tutor at the Institute of Education in London, gave a talk on 'geographical knowledge and teaching geography'. one takeaway for me was her introduction of Bonnet's (2003) distinction between academic geography and so-called 'popular' geography (that is, geography as promoted and defined by institutions such as the mass media).
Clare's colleague and fellow doctoral student at the IofE - Alun Morgan - rounded off the afternoon for me with his presentation on 'developing geographical wisdom: post-formal thinking about, and relating to, the world'. Alun made the special point that both education for sustainable development and education for global citizenship are predicated on expansive conceptions of justice, moral relevance and compassionate identification to other players - human and non-human. as such, he sees that education for one necessitates education for the other. finally, borrowing from the ideas of Rittel in the seventies, Alun has coined the term 'wicked geography' to describe these self-same ill-structured problems that so characterise discussions of sustainable development and global citizenship.
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