Teachers envisioning future geography education at their schools

Abstract

One of the challenges of a geography teacher education program is preparing teachers for their leading roles in keeping geography education relevant for the young people of today. It is important to allow teachers to think about geography education and the future and to foster their curriculum-making competences. In a master course at Fontys University of Applied Sciences, geography teachers are encouraged to develop an informed vision of geography education. One of their assignments is to write an essay-based on both literature and practical research-about "what geography education should look like at their schools five years in the future". We analysed these essays to understand teachers' ideal future images about geography education. For the analyses, we used two models of curriculum making. Most of the teachers express innovative ideas about classroom practice, how to stimulate student learning, and how to make geography lessons more interesting. They express responsibility for student learning. In addition to teachers' promising ideas about learning activities, it is far more difficult for them to adopt a clear vision of geography education and to reason from this vision. Making balanced proposals for future geography education using the different elements of creating a curriculum (aims, content, activities and assessment) is a big challenge and deserves specific attention during the master course.