Tine Béneker

World-mindedness of students and their geography education at international (IB-DP) and regular schools in the Netherlands

This article reports the results of a study conducted to gain insight into the worldmindedness of young people living in the Netherlands. Two groups are compared: students attending ‘regular’ Dutch schools and students attending international schools. A questionnaire measured the students’ world-mindedness and their evaluation of their geography education in terms of global content and pedagogy. In our limited study, international school students were overall more world-minded than young people attending Dutch conventional schools. However, similarities were also seen: both groups were positive about values such as respect, diversity, and sustainability, and less positive about values such as solidarity and equality. International schools aimed more towards global learning than did Dutch schools, because of the experiential learning of students exposed to an international educational environment. In the opinion of the students, geography education at Dutch schools was often limited to learning about global issues and perspectives,

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.

Geography Education and Global Understanding: Exploring Some Ideas and Trends in a Fast-Changing World

In times in which not only technological changes but also bewildering political changes create an insecure society in many parts of the world, it is important to contribute to an increase of Global Understanding. 2016 was the International Year of Global Understanding, a project that will go on in the coming years. For us, still a basic and important question is what we consider as Global Understanding and how geography education can help to promote it. Central in this contribution are the outcomes of a survey about Global Understanding and geography education among geography educators from all over the world. These geography educators show us that Global Understanding is an interesting but not well-defined concept. They also help us to formulate priorities for geography education and Global Understanding.

Digital Geography Education in the Twenty-First Century: Needs and Opportunities

The introduction of geospatial technologies is changing geography education very fast. Google Earth, web atlases and many location based services are available from the Internet and offer the opportunity to study almost every place in the world anytime anywhere. This opens up a great perspective for geography education in a way not known before. Nevertheless also in geography life is not just a bed of roses. The introduction of geospatial technologies is not always simple, due to technical problems and fast changing devices, a lack of experience in teaching with geospatial technologies and a huge amount of information that may prevent learners to see the wood for the trees. However, the advantages of using geospatial technologies in geography education far outweigh the problems if geographical thinking is involved. This contribution discusses briefly the needs and opportunities of digital geography education in the twenty-first century.