Studiedag voor het aardrijkskundeonderwijs
Nieuwe Duitse didactiek, een voorbeeld voor Nederland?
Nijmegen, 28 april 2010, 10.00 – 16.00 uur
Op 28 april 2010 organiseren de vakgroep sociale geografie en de universitaire lerarenopleiding van de Radboud Universiteit een studiedag over de handelingsgerichte benadering in het aardrijkskundeonderwijs. Deze benadering is één van de peilers onder het “Curriculum 2000+”, het nieuwe leerplankader voor het Duitse aardrijkskundeonderwijs. In deze benadering is veel aandacht voor de verschillen in betekenis die mensen toekennen aan een plaats of ruimte en de invloed die dat heeft op het handelen van mensen. Een kernwoord daarbij is multiperspectiviteit.
Op de studiedag willen we leraren, vakdidactici, en andere belangstellenden in een ééndaags symposium bijeenbrengen om de mogelijkheden van deze handelingsgerichte benadering in het aardrijkskundeonderwijs verder te verkennen. Wat zijn de geografische principes achter deze benaderingswijze? Hoe kunnen we dat vakdidactisch omzetten? Waarom passen nu juist deze handelingstheoretische principes en deze vakdidactiek zo zeer bij de wereld van vandaag? Hoe past deze benadering in de huidige Nederlandse examenprogramma’s? Inleiders op deze studiedag zijn de vakdidactici Prof. dr. Mirka Dickel (Univerisität Hamburg) en prof. dr. Tilman Rhode-Jüchtern (Universität Jena). Zij zullen zowel ingaan op de theoretische achtergronden van de handelingsgerichte benadering als voorbeelden geven van een concrete uitwerking daarvan in het onderwijs.
De studiedag vindt plaats in het Gymnasion, Heyendaalseweg 141, 6525 AJ Nijmegen.
Deelname aan deze studiedag is gratis. De voertaal is Engels.
Aanmelden kan tot 14 april 2010 door een e-mail te sturen aan Fer Hooghuis, e-mail f.hooghuis@ils.ru.nl, onder vermelding van “Symposium 28 april 2010”. Deelname bij latere aanmelding kan niet gegarandeerd worden.
Links naar de website van de referenten:
Prof. dr. Tilman-Rohde Jüchtern
Introduction
Nowadays geography is finally acknowledged as a real science. This can for
example be seen in the form of millions of Euros being poured in many
geographical research and consultancy projects. Today geography is not just used
as some amateur way of bridging the gap between or synthesising the results of
other sciences. Serious research is now being carried out in more depth and more
applied ways, e.g. in pedology, remote sensing, GIS modelling, and
philosophy-led construction and reflection of constructivist human geography and
cartography. Geographers are now finding work in all kinds of non-governmental
organisations and at a whole range of public authorities and private companies.
On top of this, geographers are nowadays very present in all kinds of media such
as newspapers, radio and television but also on the internet, etc. So the
traditional image of geography as a sedate and banal subject involving cities,
countries and rivers finally seems to have been banished.
However, current innovations are only slowly trickling down into the subject’s didactics despite the fact that a number of teachers, schools and trainers are already promoting the latest developments on an individual basis. One such example of this is the ‘Syndrome Concept’, devised by the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) in 1996, which failed to be mentioned in a well-circulated didactics manual as late as 2008. This leads us to deduce that there is a time lag of at least ten years when it comes to didactics.
Here is an excerpt from the ‘little prince’s’ meeting with a geographer on a small, far-away planet:
“What is a geographer?” asked the little prince. “A geographer is a scholar who knows the location of all the seas, rivers, towns, mountains, and deserts.” “That is very interesting,” said the little prince. “Here at last is a man who has a real profession!”
(…)
“Geography books,” said the geographer, “are the most valuable books of all. They never become old-fashioned. It is very rarely that a mountain changes its position. It is very rarely that an ocean empties itself of its waters. We write of eternal things.” “But extinct volcanoes may come to life again,” the little prince interrupted. (...) “Whether volcanoes are extinct or alive, it comes to the same thing for us,” said the geographer. “The thing that matters to us is the mountain. It does not change.”
It would be easy to feel flattered by this, but in fact it is just a little prince who is amazed at the geographer. But even the little prince interrupts from time to time with a "but…" sentence or question. Did the little prince understand the geographer’s double-barrelled answer? The volcano doesn’t change since an eruption is part of a volcano’s existence. The difference here is that the little prince considers a current natural event to be something special, whereas the geographer sees the dynamics of it all due to eternal laws of nature and the putative chaos within nature as being perpetually natural. This little story is however good at highlighting a number of misunderstandings.
What can we do to prevent any further misunderstandings in the future? How can we find out what other people are thinking? How can we make sure that we don’t give up monitoring nature and society too early? We need to make sure that we don’t just think in terms of cause and effect, i.e. causalities, we need to think in terms of contingencies. Something may happen one way, but it could just as well happen another way, which is equally ‘correct’. Yes, we could also think in terms of emergences, but we would not be able to explain it in a causal way.
One way of looking at the relationship between the environment and society and the individual would be the shock experienced by the young hero in ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ who no longer recognises the world around him – the city, landscape and lake around him seem unfamiliar and do not help him to gain his bearings:
“I’ve lived in New York all my life, and I know Central Park like the back of my hand, because I used to roller-skate there all the time and ride my bike when I was a kid, but I had the most terrific trouble finding that lagoon that night. I knew right where it was – it was right near Central Park South and all – but I still couldn’t find it.”
What is going on here? Why is seventeen-year-old Holden Caulfield suddenly lost in Central Park and no longer knows it “like the back of my hand”? The answer to this is that he only knew the place when riding his bike or on his skates and now sees the park from a completely different perspective, i.e. he no longer recognises things he would otherwise be familiar with. To put this in simple terms, Central Park had a single dimension but now suddenly has other attributes and is perceived to be a different ‘entity’ depending on what people are looking for or want to see. What is the reason behind this? The object, in this case the park, has various attributes, and the observer has a single (or suddenly several) special perspectives. The clear and simple premise here is that each subject, whether it be a skater, drug dealer, jogger, police officer, or elderly person, has a different perception of a certain object. For each subject the park is an environment, but a completely different and personal one. The complexity of the park is not attributable to its material reality and representation on a city map – it is all about the perspectives and interaction of the subjects. Here, the subjects move around within this medium like fish in an aquarium, with the observer generally looking in from the outside and perceiving what is going on inside to be an object.
Geographers no longer only see a city map, they also see subjects. The actions of the subjects are what give the ‘container’ park its meaning, which in turn may objectively change the park – both in the short and long term. We cannot say or teach things ‘the way they are’ any more; we also have to try and find out whether that really is the case, whether it is always the case, and where it applies. “What does the park mean to you (or person XY)?”, you could ask a school pupil. You could also reply and ask a question such as “That is just the way it is! – Is it really like that?”, which would allow old trains of thought to be combined with modern ones.
This all results in two fundamental questions: What do we perceive and how do we perceive it? This in turn is immediately followed by the fundamental conviction that geography does not exist, geography is made.
And that takes us right back to didactics...
Haubrich et al.: The new didactics of
geography
A. de Saint-Exupery: The little prince. 1943/1986. p.54
J.D. Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye. Suffolk, Penguin Books 1994, p.
139
Programme
Welcome
dr. Martin van der Velde (Vakgroep Sociale Geografie, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen)
Beyond Geography: The World with wide Eyes
Prof. dr. Timan Rohde-Jüchtern & Prof. dr. Mirka Dickel
Lecture I
Exposition I Beyond Geography !? Finding & inventing topics – A Tool
Exposition II The World – A playground for everyday lives e.g. Venice like no one has ever observed before
Lecture II
Theoretical approaches and didactic reductions: “Curriculum 2000+”
Lunchbreak
Lecture III
At the threshold of discourse – Spaces perceived, conceived, lived
Practice
Teaching geography: A knitwork
Afterword
Fer Hooghuis (Instituut voor Leraar en School, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen)