today was the second and final day for presentations of papers at the conference of the British Sub-committee of the International Geographical Union's Commission for Geographical Education.
the day started on an olfactory note with a paper by Kim Hakhee, of the Institute of Education here in London, entitled 'Exploring geographies of the senses: The role of smell in geographical experiences'. through the use of the word 'sensescapes', she suggested a sensual turn in geography, away from the hegemony of the visual. it was her argument that this might be an effective way into meeting current curricular demands for more affective learning. i can't help but wonder what forms fieldwork activites would take, if they were explicitly structured to meet such multi-sensory objectives and learning processes. Hakhee introduced me to an article by a Singaporean - Kelvin E Y Low, published in 2005 in Volume 53 of Current sociology, entitled 'Ruminations on smell as a sociocultural phenomenon'.
continuing the experiential theme, Sirpa Tani, of the University of Helsinki, talked about 'Paths through time, space and life: Methodological reflections on the meanings of environment'. although she didn't (strangely enough, considering that she hails from Finland) mention the word 'lifeblog', i felt that usage of this tool would have essentially encapsulated the gist of her presentation; especially so when she went on to describe how - three years' ago - Latham has (in his 'Researching and writing everyday accounts of the city', in Picturing the social landscape: Visual methods and the sociological imagination edited by Knowles and Sweetman) resurrected Hägerstrand's ideas from the 1970s on time-geographies. for instance, in 'environments in one week', she talked about the tensions faced by her students as they tried to resolve the everyday with the ideal, and what constituted their preferred environment (the natural, or the built), as well as the interface between the physical, social and imagined.
Peter Ciccariello's 'imaginal landscapes' were a big part of Olivier Mentz's talk. Olivier is from the HDG Scientific Association for Geography Education, in Germany. he posed the question 'Poetic geography or geographic poetry: A way to European cultural literacy?' he outlined several so-called 'European competencies' (which, to me, have relevance in citizenship education beyond Europe), namely: geographical skills, understanding how Europe works, familiarity with history, perception of identity, knowledge of languages, awareness of geopolitics, and European cultural literacy. for the latter, he drew the contrast between, on the one hand, using learner-authored poetry from geographic stimuli (geographic poetry) as a window into their respective cultural backgrounds, and, on the other, the comparative analysis of more established poetic works on place (poetic geography). Olivier illustrated his points using Vltava, which is one of six symphonic poems by the 19th century Czech composer Bedrich Smetana.
today's keynote was given by Professor Sarah Bednarz of Texas A & M University. it set the theme for the remainder of the sessions i attended today.
Sarah's keynote was entitled 'Mapping the way forward in an uncertain world: Spatial thinking and geography'. She artfully wove all manner of seemingly diverse concepts, such as homeland security, natural hazards, navigation and wayfinding, and technologically-mediated spatial cognition, into a spellbinding narrative. she distinguished three types of spatial thinking:
- the geography of life spaces (cognition in space); she reminded us that connections could be drawn with careers (air traffic control), sports (soccer), evacuation routes, and even seemingly mundane things such as how one packs one's schoolbag, as a way in to introducing the learner to geographical thinking
- the geography of physical spaces (cognition about space)
- the geography of intellectual spaces (cognition with space); including, for example, population pyramids, computer user interfaces, virtual environments and games
Sarah also talked about how Mishra and Koehler last year extended Shulman's triad of content knowledge, pedagogic knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge, by throwing technological competence into the mix. she shared how, in her own research, teachers were slower to develop along the content-pedagogy axis, than they were along the technology-pedagogy axis. finally, she stressed how sometimes, learners are hampered in geographical understanding by the very basic issue of a limited vocabulary (having difficulty understanding a seemingly simple instruction such as "zoom in to the edge"), and how therefore less glamourous - though equally effective - scaffolds, such as flipbooks, can be used to supplement the digital tools. Sarah also reminded us that gender differences do exist in terms of the preferred modes of manipulating geographic information. not your grandmother's geography indeed.
Kostis Koutsopoulos, of the National Technical University of Athens, talked about 'Teaching and learning geography with maps: A conceptual framework'. this was a very though-provoking paper. his framework for teaching geography with maps, essentially describes how space is transposed cognitively through a series of processes, from mapping to the didactic, to the cognitive and finally the geographic. i feel that this framework helps us understand better how and why both teachers and learners have difficulty with map-based learning activities, because sometimes the objectives of the activities (be they skills, content, or perspective-appreciation) are not well-aligned with the processes of learning.
Jo Injeong, who is Sarah's grad student at Texas A & M, presented a paper on 'Aspects of spatial thinking in geography textbooks'. this was another presentation that made us sit up and take note. Injeong talked about her findings as she applied a taxonomy which she had devised, on the nature of questions posed in a range of geography textbooks from America. her three-dimensional taxonomy looked at geographical concepts, geographical representations, and geographical reasoning. suffice to say that many of the geography textbooks under her scrutiny didn't fare too well. it's a wake-up call for curriculum developers all over the world, not just in America.
Alfons Koller, from the University of Pedagogic of the Diocese Linz, in Austria, talked about 'Thinking spatially: A new mainstream in teaching geography?!' he helped me realise that in the German-speaking world, GIS technologies are fairly mature and adoption at both government- and popular-levels is widespread. nevertheless, Alfons still felt that they weren't quite mainstream technologies yet, as current limiting factors are teacher capacity, school infrastructural support, and a dearth of supporting academic research.
the last presentation i attended was by Josef Strobl, of Salzburg University. his paper was entitled 'Geographic learning in social web environments'. Josef is obviously comfortable in the Web 2.0 world. he is one of the pioneering educators to be so, and it was refreshing to hear from him, because unlike so many Web 2.0 pundits, he is also very firmly grounded in geographical thinking and theory. he reminded us that it has only been recently that the cognitive challenge of simultaneously changing scale and location has been so democratized (through, eg, Google Earth). he also challenged us to think about how wikis and Google Earth might be mashed up. i am also going to think seriously about geo-tagging and GeoRSS, now that (ostensibly, at least) the Nokia N95 is compatible with the Mac OS. but to what extent would i be able to get a good satellite fix with an N95 in built-up Singapore? Josef also introduced the term 'geofencing', by which he loosely referred to concepts of Location-Based buddy-awareness, and how such services might be used to build whole new Communities of Practice (which, he stressed, update themselves - for the first time in human history - dynamically in real-time).
i feel that it's this element of 'spatial thinking' which is weak in the geography syllabuses in Singapore's formal curriculum. we are strong on 'the man-land relationship', but found wanting on the former; without which - it seems fairly obvious to say - we could hardly properly term what we are attempting to teach as truly 'geography', and should consequently not be too surprised when both our teachers and learners struggle with reading maps, and conducting fieldwork.
Show notes:
- Peter Ciccariello's blog Invisible Notes
Technorati Tags: cognition, education, geography, globalization, IGU-CGE(UK)2007, learning, lifeblog, maps, navigation, place, semiotics, TLLM, Web 2.0, wiki
