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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.

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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

Assessment ?

To verify knowledge, skills (and attitudes), use tools in which students have the opportunity to describe and explain the causes and rules of geographical processes and phenomena.

Monitored evaluation criteria:

    • geographical in terms of content: factuality, used terminology, visuality (possibility of graphic representation or presentation of an experiment or a thematic project), an indication of causes and their connection with consequences (their number, depth of understanding, scope of understanding), support for arguments, etc.
    • competence: accuracy, clarity, structuring of ideas, comprehensibility,  logical line of explanation, precise presentation of the problem, etc. 

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

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How did you arrive at the causes?

Why do you use this term and not another? What exactly does this term mean?

What makes it impossible for you to explain cause/effect?

How exactly does it work?

Why do you think this way about connections and consequences of causes?

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Teacher:

  • Expertise in geography
  • Students are often asked: “Why…?”
  • Explains the subject in depth

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This is a conception that builds on expertise. Earthist teachers are excellent geographers, they are recruited from among professional geographers and approved teachers who were excellent, especially in the professional component of the study. They place emphasis on explaining the curriculum using deeper geographical knowledge. They get to the bottom of things, they tend to ask students problem-oriented learning tasks, and they often use the question “Why?” They require knowledge of rules, regularities, causes and effects. They don’t want to stick to just factual knowledge and have lessons based on completing stereotypical fact-based worksheets, crosswords and knowledge quizzes. They want a classroom full of students who understand what’s going on in the world and how things work on Earth – how a volcano forms, why we have variable weather today, and how the water cycle works in nature. It will explain why we need dams or industry, and why we need to solve the climate crisis or the migration crisis. The teacher often deals with more complex subjects, striving for a deeper understanding on the part of the pupils. The teacher uses geographic media – GIS, models, interesting posters, visualizes with sketches, and draws diagrams. Earthists are aware of their high expertise, show off their knowledge, and are proud of it. They tend to show videos with a focus on explanation rather than e.g. a tourism documentary on Iceland etc. They show how volcanoes work, why earthquakes occur etc. but often don’t show pupils the manifestations of volcanoes or earthquakes set in specific locations. For Earthist teachers, longer thematic blocks of the curriculum lasting, for example, three or more teaching hours, as well as longer-term geographical projects are typical.

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Student:

    • Experiences research geography
    • Looks for answers to more complex questions
    • Works with geographic data and methods

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Teaching with an earthist approach can be quite attractive to students. Students are researchers – together with the teacher they search for answers to more complex geographical questions. Tasks and projects are often related to attractive topics and are also relevant to everyday life or to the interests of the Students. Students often work with geographical methods and geographical data in lessons and formulate hypotheses or verify or apply already existing theories.

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Teacher:

  • Teaching based on deep knowledge of the field
  • High demands placed on students’ thinking
  • Immersion in the subject matter, less regard for pupils

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This conception of geography teaching is not for every teacher, as it requires deep geographical knowledge and developed thinking in context, especially within the topic being discussed. It can sometimes be challenging for teachers to admit that when they expect deeper understanding, there must be a group of students who will not meet the highest expectations. The danger also lies in overestimating the cognitive abilities of pupils. Geography in the Earthist conception goes beyond simple fractography, which for some teachers requires stepping out of their comfort zone because in geography they have to work at the level of theory. In this conception, the theory is understood in the scientific sense of the word – at the level of knowledge that contributes to the explanation of geographical phenomena and processes. Even for the teachers themselves, this concept of geography can be challenging to think about – there are always some questions that the teacher does not know the answer to, and must therefore immerse himself in his studies. Almost every academic geographer is an Earthist, and proud of it. Earthists often lack the teacher superstructure, they like to show students how educated they are smart, but they don’t care so much about the student’s ability to understand all phenomena as deeply as they do. Earthist teachers also often remain at the level of general regularities and rules without a specific connection to the places where geographical phenomena and processes take place. They can show you deserts, but they often don’t tell you where the deserts, volcanoes, etc. they show in the photo and how the people live around them. Earthists do not primarily deal with interactions and relationships between nature and people, nor how people transform nature and the environment. They are often too deeply immersed in geographical phenomena and processes. At the same time, it is very difficult for Earthists to keep a geographical perspective and the specificity of geography as a field at the centre of attention. With Earthists, there is often a danger that the teacher will cross the borders of geography and will also pay attention in detail to the curriculum belonging to other subjects.

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Student:

  • Do not always have to meet the high demands set by the teacher
  • May not be open to higher-order thinking
  • Fatigue from the high difficulty of the subject matter

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If a teacher sticks to this conception for a long time, it can create something like barriers between students and classes – some students may love geography, and others may hate it because they will not meet the expectations of the teacher. Earthly-conceived teaching can be demanding in terms of the student’s cognitive capacity. If you have geography last lesson on Friday or any last class of the week, after physical education, etc., students will not appreciate this concept because they are tired. The first hour on Monday can be the same – everyone is still asleep. In short, teaching geography in this sense is demanding.

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Benefits of registered users

Exclusive access to a database and community of engaged geography teachers.
Draw inspiration for other conceptions.
Conveniently browse topics and think about your own teaching.
Know the connections between conceptions.
Experience GEOWHEEL or have instructions on how to comprehensively grasp geography education.
Archiving test results to monitor the development of one's own teacher identity.
Invitations to events with members of the project team and special events.
Access to the archive of worksheets for pupils and other teaching materials.
Detailed results with commentary and practical recommendations.
... Well, the students will simply love you, because they will enjoy your teaching!