Organising concepts in geography education: a model

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article presents a model for organising geographical concepts that aims to support teachers’ choices of what to teach and how to organise a cohesive and appropriate teaching plan for school geography. The model is a result of a collaborative research process between researchers and Swedish teachers. The purpose was to explore how the core concepts of geography, which are implicit in the Swedish syllabus (Örbring, 2017), can be used in teaching as powerful tools for learning (Brooks, 2018) and to develop epistemic teaching practices for school geography to counterbalance the traditional focus on content (Eriksson and Lindberg, 2016; Knorr-Cetina, 1999). During professional development seminars, teachers’ experiences were linked to procedural concepts in geography (i.e. concepts that mediate specific geographical ways of thinking and doing (Lambert, 2011)), used at an organisational level in line with models introduced by Taylor (2008). This article describes a model that integrates geographical concepts and suggests how they could be used as tools in relation to each other as well as to specific content. Here, we present the considerations behind the structure and functions of the model, and teachers’ reflections on producing and using it in class as a way to develop students’ geographical knowing.