Congratulations

You belong to a group of teachers who want students to know the answers to more challenging geography questions (“Why?” questions).

You enjoy solving geographical problems that pupils have to deal with. In your classes, students often work as real geographers. You create opportunities to work with text and other information sources, students independently collect data and then analyze it and draw conclusions.

Your teaching often leads students to recognize and discover the interactions between people and the environment, or you deal with the causes and effects of geographical phenomena.

In addition to doing geographical research with your pupils, you are also interested in studying more general geographical topics, including in the teaching of regional geography. You and the pupils also spend more time studying selected places or regions in more detail, even at the cost of not having time to discuss other places or regions.

Example:

When information about a volcanic eruption appears in the media, you can immediately prepare a lesson about the processes that lead to the emergence of volcanic activity. In geography lessons, pupils deepen their knowledge of how volcanoes are formed and, above all, what are the consequences of volcanic activity for people’s lives and the surrounding environment . Using examples of specific places affected by volcanic activity, students demonstrate the relationships between the natural and social components of the landscape . In addition, students explain the pros and cons of living in places affected or threatened by volcanic activity. Pupils have the opportunity to think about it, why people live in the immediate vicinity of volcanoes, why, for example, there are fertile soils around volcanoes, how volcanoes can be used in terms of tourism and how people deal with the various consequences of volcanic activity on a local and global level.

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Teachers focus on scientific reasoning and making connections

Get to know the conceptions in which you scored high and develop in the conceptions that are not quite close to you.

YOUR PREVALING CONCEPTION. Know more about your conception:

Interactionist

To reveal the relationships between people and nature/environment

Other preferred conceptions. Take a look at whar is still close to you:

Facilitator

Educate through geography, develop students’ personality and key competences

Earthist

To understand what is happening on Earth, how the Earth works

Less represented conceptions. Here you will already discover new things:

Environmentalist

To warn against the environmental crisis and climate change, to look for possible solutions

Localist

Get to know and discover the immediate surroundings

Placeist

Discover and get to know diverse places and the life of the people in them

Completely marginal conceptions. Here is where you can really go wild exploring.

Globalist

To orientate in the world and have a general overview of it

Synthesizer

Connect the curriculum of different subjects

Map-lover

Analyze, interpret and create maps

Your dominant conception of geography teaching is

Interactionist

To reveal the relationships between people and nature/environment

Supported questions

How does it relate to human activity? How does man influence and change the landscape/nature? How does the landscape affect a person? Why does a person behave this way in a certain landscape? How does man use nature and why? Why does man fail to use natural resources sustainably? How is the character of the landscape/environment related to human activity?

Oriented to

topics based on human geography (globalization, transport, migration, settlement, urbanization, agriculture, etc.) showing the influence on nature/landscape, but also topics from physical geography (volcanic activity, earthquakes, geomorphology, climate, biomes, etc.), which affect the lives of people on Earth. Searching for laws and interactions between nature and man.

Recommendation

Emphasizing human-nature interactions requires a thorough knowledge of contexts within selected topics of physical and human geography. Subsequently, it is advisable to look for suitable examples of interactions between man and nature in regions of different levels of order (from global to local), including the transferability of knowledge to other regions. It is also appropriate to focus on the development of interactions between man and nature in time and space.

In the interactionist ‘s view, it is primarily a matter of naming interactions and penetrating their substantive nature). As soon as the teacher starts to place more emphasis on solving unwanted effects, impacts and threats resulting from human-nature interactions, incl. forming attitudes and value judgments, this is a shift towards the Environmentalist.

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Demonstration of specific learning objectives

The student will explain how drought/mining… has an effect on the lives of residents.

The student will describe how the monsoons affect the lives of the people of India.

The student analyzes how humans have contributed to the current state of the Aral Sea.

The student will explain why the consequences of the tsunami were so devastating for the population of Indonesia.

The student explains why people cut down tropical rainforests.

The student will explain how natural conditions affect population density.

Typical methods and tasks

It is not primarily a deeper study of the causes and consequences of partial geographical phenomena and processes, the focus is on the search, description and analysis of interactions between people and nature, the search for these interactions, “seeing” these interactions and distinguishing the diversity of these interactions across regions.

Topics for students' work

analysis of texts, videos, web applications showing changes in nature and landscape caused by human activity, e.g. mining of minerals, demographic, economic and cultural changes

Focusing on

searching for patterns of interactions, describing interactions and thinking about them, why they are important and when they are unnecessary, working with resources, “seeing” interactions around you and on Earth

Expectations from pupils

knowledge: regularities and interrelationships between the natural component and human action, time perspective of interactions (thinking in the context of development), distinguishes random (chaotic), cyclical, equilibrium-leading development

skills: analyzing texts, working with sources and map materials, searching for information describing interactions, “seeing” interactions in real life

attitudes: being convinced that the causality of man and nature exists leads to a change in thinking about one’s actions

Theoretical background

Encyclopedia of Migration

Google Earth Timelapse

Why natural resource use matters?

App for the population distribution on Earth

Overfishing Monitoring App (Oceans region) - Global Fishing Watch

Assessment ?

To verify knowledge, skills (and attitudes), we focus primarily on the variety of interactions, the nature of interactions, the intensity of interactions and their visualization .

We set the evaluation criteria as:

geographical in content: factual correctness, terminology, landscape typology, number of interactions, knowledge of the development of interaction, giving examples of interaction, description of the nature according to the regularity of interaction, distinguishing the intensity of interaction, reasoning (inference),
competence: accuracy, clarity, imaginativeness, finding background and evidence of interactions in sources,

For formative feedback, we recommend asking questions based on the evaluation criteria for each of the topics:

Teacher:

Primarily works with the relationship between people and nature
Thinks in relationships and contexts
Extends the curriculum from physical geography to the impact on people’s lives

The interactionist is a teacher who bases geographical topics and explanations on the relationship between people and nature. Although interactionists work primarily with the links between people and nature, they do not search for the deep causes of these links. Interactionists always emphasize the impact of physical-geographical phenomena and processes on the life of people on Earth and often demonstrate the impact using examples from students’ everyday life. Interactionists think most of all concepts about the connections between people and nature, which according to some definitions, is the main essence of geography as a field. They know that geography is not only about explanation because it is impossible to justify its usefulness only on explanation. Interactionists focus on geographical phenomena and processes (less, for example, on the states of the world). Therefore, they always ask how the discussed phenomena and processes are connected with the activities and lives of people and evaluate the nature of these relationships. If the teacher is discussing desert biomes, he will not forget to discuss how people have adapted to life in deserts. In the case of discussing plate tectonics, the teacher does not forget to discuss how volcanic activity affects people’s lives – negatively and positively. On the one hand, volcanoes threaten people’s lives and destroy property, and can cause the collapse of cities and nations, which is rarely represented in the teaching of geography. On the other hand, volcanoes have created fertile soil and thus indirectly support the existence of successful civilizations. Interactionists often deal with what people should do when a flood, avalanche, tornado, or wildfire occurs. This is something that is not very well represented in the textbooks and curriculum, although it is precisely in teaching conceived in this way that interactions are most evident. This concept has great potential for building a positive image of geography as a useful science.

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Student:

Enticing and useful topics
Changes in nature as a result of human activity
The core of geography lies in relationships and contexts

Teacher:

Favouring an anthropocentric view
Less emphasis on basic geographical knowledge
Geography is fun because it is about life

Interactionist teachers often favour an anthropocentric view. They don’t deal with sustainability too much – they take environmental problems as a reality, they often claim that it is a problem, but on the other hand, they state that people have to make a living somehow, work somewhere, and get energy from something. Teachers are often deeply immersed in the topic being discussed and neglect the fact that the pupils have not acquired basic geographical knowledge, or possibly have no idea what the aim of the lesson is. The interactionist often asks the pupils where Geography is or what is about the geographical topic being discussed. Unfortunately, the interactionist conception of geography teaching is often not appreciated by parents or students. Teaching geography in this sense is similar to an article in National Geographic magazine or a documentary on the Discovery Channel. Teachers present attractive and useful topics to students.

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Student:

May not realize they are learning
Does not have clear and concrete knowledge that he is supposed to learn by heart
Geography can be seen as a leisure subject

Students are usually so preoccupied with interactionist teaching that they do not realize that they are learning. Students enjoy learning about the effects of humans on nature. But if you ask the students later what they learned, they often have no idea. A fun and useful geography lesson from the student’s point of view often does not bring concrete knowledge that could be evaluated in terms of their memory acquisition or newly acquired skills. There is a danger that students may see geography as nothing more than entertainment.

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Other conceptions in which you scored high