Congratulations

You belong to a group of teachers who want their students to be prepared for everyday life.

You like to use different teaching methods in teaching geography. Your teaching is thematically varied and your teaching often deviates from the content of the textbooks. Because you have your own supply of teaching materials and preparations that are better than what the textbook offers you.

Your teaching leads to the general development of students. What the pupils have learned in your lessons, they will also use in the teaching of other subjects and also in everyday life. Pupils express themselves correctly and intelligibly, work with resources, cooperate and argue, which they also use in teaching other subjects. You focus on developing geographical thinking, which enables pupils to apply geographical knowledge in different environments and situations. You are not afraid to work with the experiences, experiences, attitudes and opinions of your students.

You often solve current questions and problems with the pupils, you discuss with them, and you often think about how to demonstrate geographical phenomena using examples from the pupils’ everyday life, thereby developing so-called useful geography.

You work using the project method, the pupils are very involved in the teaching and the subjects covered are usually concluded with presentations by the pupils. Pupils rate your lessons as fun.

Example:

When information about a volcanic eruption appears in the media, you can immediately prepare a lesson about the effects of volcanic activity on people’s lives. Pupils in geography lessons work with photographs and video recordings capturing the stories of people living around volcanoes . Pupils discover in specific places how volcanic activity affects people’s everyday life and try to empathize with the problems that these people have to solve . By comparing different places, students discover what these places have in common and how places affected or threatened by volcanic activity differ from other places on Earth. Students present all their findings in front of the class.

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Teachers focused on the application of the curriculum in everyday life and the general development of students

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:

Synthesizer

Connect the curriculum of different subjects

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

Facilitator

Educate through geography, develop students’ personality and key competences

Placeist

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

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

Globalist

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

Localist

Get to know and discover the immediate surroundings

Interactionist

To reveal the relationships between people and nature/environment

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

Earthist

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

Environmentalist

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

Map-lover

Analyze, interpret and create maps

Your dominant conception of geography teaching is

Synthesizer

Connect the curriculum of different subjects

Supported questions

How and in what way does it intertwine with other subjects?

What other fields is it related to?

What fields of knowledge help us explain this phenomenon or process?

How can geography help other disciplines?

Oriented to

integration of content into a wider context, to more demanding syntheses and intersubject relationships. They choose more general topics that allow them to demonstrate their knowledge of other fields and subjects (natural history, biology, history, art education, chemistry, physics, civics, mathematics, etc.). It uses a variety of geographical topics from physical, socio-economic geography, but also cultural and political geography. It can be about topics such as drought, water, landscape, environment, population, conflicts, etc. The goal is not only to connect geography with as many disciplines as possible, but the quality of the connection.

Recommendation

This conception requires choosing the right geographical topic, having p marks from other fields and knowledge of intersubject connections (also whether knowledge has already been discussed in other subjects or not).

Demonstration of specific learning objectives in connection with biology:

The student will find and list three invasive species of organisms in a chosen country.

in relation to history:

The student will state the historical context of the founding of the EU.

in relation to civic education:

The student will explain the legislative reasons for establishing ……………a chosen country.

in relation to art education:

The student will assess the aesthetic aspects of the landscape (maps, etc.).

in relation to chemistry:

The student assesses the chemical composition of the rock.

The topic of water circulation in nature: chemistry (composition), physics (laws of state), VV (illustration by drawing), civic education (legislation on water resource management), biology (soil types and types) etc. can contribute.

Typical methods and tasks

Above all, these are group work and individual (medium-term) activities explaining geographical phenomena and processes in the context of other disciplines. Use of methods and tasks from other concepts.

Topics for students' work

the use of connecting the curriculum of different subjects, working with notebooks and textbooks of other subjects, searching for materials from other fields to create synthetic knowledge

Focusing on

development of thinking in context and in the context of other fields, thorough understanding of geographical phenomena and processes

Expectations from pupils

knowledge: from other fields are only a mediator to understand a geographical phenomenon or process, knowledge from all concepts

skills: classification of knowledge according to fields and their synthesis, creation of complex schemes, assessment of the relevance of knowledge

attitudes: realizing that geography is a science that must cooperate with other disciplines, distinguishing what geography is about and what geography is not

Theoretical background

Where does your phone come from?

Data: The world Bank

Assessment ?

When verifying knowledge, skills and attitudes, we do not focus on findings from other fields. We focus on using, connecting and understanding the geogarphic phenomenon and process.

The evaluation is based on the following criteria:

geographical in content : the correctness of the concepts used and the criteria in other concepts
competence: analyzes correlation with other disciplines, work with resources

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

Teacher:

Emphasis on interdisciplinary relationships
A modern conception of geography based on synthesis
Motivates interdisciplinary cooperation

The Synthesizer conception is based on finding the connections and relationships of the subject being discussed with the subject matter of other subjects. Teachers favoring this conception most often find cross-subject connections with their next approval subject, however, they also rely on connecting the curriculum with other subjects. Cross-subject relationships do not necessarily take place only with related subjects (natural and social sciences), connecting geography curriculum with mathematics, languages (CLIL method) and education is also common. The conception of a synthesizer is suitable for inexperienced teachers because geography can be understood in cross-subject contexts through this concept. This trend currently corresponds to the modern concept of geography as a science, as it allows moving on the edges of geography and spilling over into other disciplines. Geography as a science has long been understood as a discipline based on more demanding syntheses of partial geographical (and other related) disciplines. The conception of a synthesizer makes it possible to find syntheses not only within geography, but the overlaps of these syntheses with the curriculum of other subjects are especially valuable. It should be remembered that once we ask three times in a row “why?” in solving geographical problems, the answer will usually require knowledge that goes beyond geography as a field. This motivates teachers to interdisciplinary cooperation also at the school level, especially with teachers sitting together in the cabinet, or at the level of subject committees. but the overlaps of these syntheses with the curriculum of other subjects are especially valuable. It should be remembered that once we ask three times in a row “why?” in solving geographical problems, the answer will usually require knowledge that goes beyond geography as a field. This motivates teachers to interdisciplinary cooperation also at the school level, especially with teachers sitting together in the cabinet, or at the level of subject committees. But these syntheses’ overlaps with the curriculum of other subjects are especially valuable. It should be remembered that once we ask three times in a row “why?” in solving geographical problems, the answer will usually require knowledge that goes beyond geography as a field. This motivates teachers to interdisciplinary cooperation also at the school level, especially with teachers sitting together in the cabinet, or at the level of subject committees.

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Student:

Complexity and completeness of the curriculum
Connecting the curriculum of different subjects
School-wide projects focused on larger themes

The positive aspect of teaching based on the concept of a synthesizer is the complexity and thematic integrity of the curriculum. The student does not run into barriers and boundaries between individual subjects, and on the contrary benefits from linking the curriculum of different subjects in a wider context. As thematically related subjects are often discussed at school in different subjects and different grades, the teaching of geography has the potential to repeat, consolidate and apply the subject matter of other subjects. The student is practically confronted with the advantages of multidisciplinary approaches and perceives the benefits of individual disciplines at school as well as the necessity of interdisciplinary cooperation to build human knowledge.

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Teacher:

The risk of geography falling behind
Requires knowledge of the curriculum and content of other fields, incl. timetables
The need to communicate with teachers of other subjects

If the concept of the synthesizer dominates significantly, there is a risk of disappearing, being marginalized or not using the educational and application potential of geography for life in the 21st century. The teaching of geography should primarily convey to pupils the views, ways of knowing and perspectives typical of geography as a field. A typical slogan of a synthesizer might be: “geography is everywhere” or “geography is everything”, but no one can say what is the subject of geography and what is not. If we leave aside the marginalization of geography as a field, it is also necessary to take into account that the concept of a synthesizer requires a high degree of orientation in the goals, contents and time plans of other teaching subjects. This also involves the need to communicate with other teachers, agree and coordinate teaching with each other. Of course, everything mentioned cannot be done without a deeper knowledge of the curriculum of other fields,

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Student:

- The unclear boundary of geography as a field
- The danger of unclear identification of geography curriculum
- Risk of perceiving geography as an unnecessary field

In teaching in which the conception of a synthesizer is dominantly represented, the student often does not realize where the boundary of geography as a field is located (if this boundary exists at all). In this way, over time, the student may begin to perceive geography as an unnecessary and useless subject because he cannot identify when it is geography and when it is not.

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Other conceptions in which you scored high