Sirpa Tani

Achieving Human Potential Through Geography Education: A Capabilities Approach to Curriculum Making in Schools

This article provides the theoretical underpinnings for an innovative international collaborative project in the field of geography education named GeoCapabilities. The project attempts to respond in new ways to enduring challenges facing geography teachers in schools. These include the need to find convincing expression of geographys contribution to the education of all young people and coping with the apparent divergence of geography in educational settings and its highly disparate expression as a research discipline in university departments. The project also hopes to contribute to the development of a framework for communicating the aims and purposes of geography in schools internationally, because here, too, there is great variety in definitions of national standards and even of disciplinary allegiances (including, e.g., the social studies, humanities, and biological sciences). GeoCapabilities does not seek to flatten such divergences, for one of geographys great strengths is its breadth. The long-term goal is to establish a secure platform for the international development of teachers’ capacities as creative and disciplined innovators. The project encourages teachers to think beyond program delivery and implementation and to embrace their role as the curriculum makers.

PARKOUR: CREATING LOOSE SPACES?

Abstract. Parkour is a spectacular and highly mediatized new way of movement that challenges conceptions of acceptable or appropriate behaviour in urban public space. This article will examine the potential of parkour to “loosen” urban spatial texture by applying recent thinking on loose and tight space by Karen A. Franck and Quentin Stevens to data gathered through in‐depth interviews with parkour practitioners (traceurs) in two Finnish cities. When practising in urban public spaces, the traceurs we interviewed often caused confusion among other people. We explore how they negotiate their right to public space in the face of these reactions, either by evasion or with a combination of legal and moral arguments. We argue that parkour is not only a playful and confrontational practice with a potentially subversive character, but that the process of loosening space constitutes a complex dialectic, which may also involve a certain degree of tightening in the public space for other unexpected or unintended activities.

Curriculum Reform and Primary Geography in Finland: A Gap between Theory and Practice?

This paper examines geographical education for children under 13 years of age in Finland in the present situation, in which geography is taught as part of ‘Environmental and Natural Studies’, the school subject integrating biology, geography, environmental studies, civics, physics and chemistry. In the content analysis of school textbooks, attention is paid to the role of geography and some of its central concepts. It is shown how the social dimension of the environment is neglected, causing the inability to implement education for sustainable development in practice. The local environment of the students is apparent in the textbooks, but they seldom contain any social or cultural elements. The viewpoint of the article comes from the cultural turn in geography, with its ideas of subjectivity, identity and the significance of culture, because, it is argued, the theoretical debates could offer many interesting approaches for geographical education in classrooms.

Loosening/tightening spaces in the geographies of hanging out

The article is based on research conducted with young people who spend their free time hanging out in a shopping mall and its surroundings in the city centre of Helsinki, Finland. ‘Geographies of hanging out’ is understood here as an interaction between the location and young people: the space offers affordances to the young people and thus affects their ways of being. At the same time, they give new meanings to the space by hanging out and thus take part in the production of that space. Empirical material gathered in the project includes the researchers observations, in-depth interviews conducted with young people, youth workers, the police and the management of the mall and the photographs taken by the young participants. In this article, hanging out is interpreted as a process where ‘looseness’ and ‘tightness’ of space are negotiated and re-defined. Shopping malls are seen as spaces where boundaries between public and private are often blurred. The presence of young people can make these commercial spaces tighter or looser and thus change the nature of urban space not only for the young people, but for other urban dwellers, too.

The Right to be Seen, the Right to be Shown Ethical Issues Regarding the Geographies of Hanging Out

The article deals with the ethical questions that a researcher encountered when planning, conducting and reporting on research concerning young people’s everyday lives. The empirical data based on observations, photographs and interviews were gathered from among teenagers who were spending time, or ‘hanging out’, at a shopping mall in the centre of Helsinki, Finland. First, ethical dilemmas regarding the planning phase of the research are described. The data-gathering phase is then analyzed, and the status of the researcher in the ‘research field’ is explored. Lastly, the different positions of the adult researcher and young participants are illustrated by giving examples of the photographs taken. Complex issues relating to young people’s roles as either active participants in research or potentially vulnerable objects of study are discussed, and the importance of more flexible and context-sensitive solutions regarding ethical decisions is highlighted.

Integrating geography with physics and visual arts: Analysis of student essays

The article investigates the potential and challenges of integrating geography with other school subjects. The analysis is based on the outcomes of a course that introduced the principles of discipline-based integration. The course was included in multicultural-class teacher education programme at the University of Helsinki. For a project within the course, the students worked in small groups and made short films that integrated three subjects – geography, physics, and visual arts – in order to evoke questions of space in childrens minds. The students were asked to write essays in which they analysed their understanding of space from the three subjects’ viewpoints, describe the aims and contents of their short films, and lastly reflect on their experiences of the potential and possible problems in discipline integration. In this article, the authors analyse the students’ experience of the integration between the geography, physics, and visual arts. In general, the students experienced discipline-based integration as an interesting way of working. Moreover, the project seemed to deepen their understanding of different grounds for integrative pedagogy. Although the students reported some difficulties regarding the subject knowledge required for fruitful integration, the process enabled them to construct a better understanding of the identity of each discipline.

Geography in the Finnish school curriculum: part of the ‘success story’?

The article investigates the status of geography education in the Finnish national curricula from the 1970s until today. Conceptions of teaching, learning and change in society are traced through curriculum texts; in addition, the ways in which these are applied in the subject-specified aims and content of the geography curriculum are explored. This is done in the context of the success story of the Finnish education system. The analysis shows how constructivist ideas of learning have been implemented in the curriculum, but are not necessarily seen in the students’ learning outcomes. Changes in society have been reflected in the underlying values and cross-disciplinary themes defined in the curricula, although their application in geography has been relatively weak. The content of the geography curriculum has remained strongly connected to the tradition of teaching regional geography, while the close linkage between geography and biology has guaranteed a stronger position for physical rather than cultural geography. Some contemporary changes, in information and communications technology (ICT) and geographic information systems (GIS) in particular, have quickly been implemented in the geography curriculum, while some themes – for example, those emphasizing students’ everyday experiences – have remained marginal.

Young people’s world-mindedness and the global dimension in their geography education : a comparative study of upper secondary school students’ ideas in Finland, Germany and the Netherlands

Geography is one of the most important school subjects for the development of global awareness and international understanding. Curricular concepts and pedagogical strategies for developing global awareness through geography abound. What is largely unknown, however, is how young people make sense of the world in which they are growing up and if this has any relationship with their geography education.

GeoCapabilities and curriculum leadership: balancing the priorities of aim-based and knowledge-led curriculum thinking in schools

ABSTRACT The small-scale research presented in this paper was conducted as part of the GeoCapabilities project. Though originating in the Anglophone world, the project attempts to address the purposes and values of geography education internationally. Using the idea of “powerful disciplinary knowledge” the project asks what geography has to offer that helps young people develop the human capabilities they need in order to live a life that they consider valuable. In this paper, we explore the challenges and opportunities presented by GeoCapabilities in several European national contexts. We asked selected teachers and teacher educators in four different countries (Finland, Germany, The Netherlands and Sweden) what role they thought geography plays in enhancing students’ “human potential.” Despite marked differences relating to the legal and structural background in each country we found major similarities in teachers’ and teacher educators’ curriculum thinking in relation to geographys contribution to the future well-being of their students.

Young people and the hidden meanings of the everyday: time-space path as a methodological opportunity

The article explores the ways in which young people use their everyday environments and how they give meanings to their surroundings. It concentrates on the potential of the re-interpretations of 1970s time-geography by applying the method of time-space paths to educational contexts in both universities and schools. The point of view is methodological. The piloting phase took place during a number of courses on environmental education of the university level and, based on the experience gained, the method was re-developed for secondary school levels. The data were gathered from eight schools in Finland as part of the ‘Liikkeelle!’ (‘On the move!’) project, funded by the Finnish National Board of Education, where the main aim was to take students’ own neighbourhoods into account in teaching. The students were asked to make observations of their environment over a one-day period and to take photographs, which could all be used later as material for the construction of their unique time-space paths. The main contents of the paths have been analysed in the article, but more emphasis have been placed on an evaluation of the exercise in order to offer ideas for further development of these methods.