Considering geographical and environmental education at scales

Abstract

Recall the first time you used Google Earth. Most people would typically key in their address and find where they lived on a digital representation of reality on the application. It was not uncommon for someone to then zoom out of the view of their residence to the neighbourhood, and then the town, city or even country views before zooming out to see the earth as a sphere, or a two dimensional representation of the sphere on the screen. During the early days of geospatial technologies, an application like this allowed us to examine where we live across spatial scales easily. Educators were also quick to use this affordance to design lessons requiring students to examine geographical or environmental issues across spatial scales. It is not just serendipitous that geographers and geography educators also often employ scale as a framework for analysis. There is a good reason why scale is such a powerful organising and analysing concept for examining geographical and environmental phenomena. We propose that the role of scales in geographical and environmental education can be discussed through it as a substantive concept for geographical thinking, as well as a frame of analysis for issues in education. One of the key concepts that geographical education often utilises is scale. While concepts of space, place and human-environment interaction are more obviously used as examples of the signature concepts in geography, the concept of scale provides geographers with an approach that cuts across the other concepts and offers a schema for organising discussion about complex phenomena within geographical education. In discussing the contribution of Geography to education, the 2016 International Charter on Geographical Education (Stoltman, Lidstone, & Kidman, 2017), or the Charter in short, these contributions were also organised through spatial scales. From considering individual “curiosity” to understanding “relationship” to other species, to understanding “places” and “landscapes”, to what it means to live in a “tightly interconnected world”, the various contributions are explained from the local to the global scales (IGU-CGE, 2016, p. 5). Indeed, phenomena that are both natural and man-made have implications for humankind through different spatial scales. For the purpose of clarity, when referring to scale as a geographical concept, we will utilise the term spatial scale. Scale is not just limited to the way we define space or place. Chang and Wi (2018) argue that terms referring to scale like local and global are not just locations but processes in that “globalisation and localisation produce different spatial contexts that are hybrids ... of both differentiation and integration” (Chang & Wi, 2018, p. 29) – contexts that are different and contexts that are part of a larger whole. Scale as an organising concept allows us another way to examine the contexts and conditions to a geographical phenomenon other than through perspectives or standpoints, for example. For clarity, we will refer to this notion of scale as process scale. Using the notion of differentiation and integration, educational issues can also be organised across this notion of scales. For example, at the individual level, we are