Abstract
The study on which this chapter is based provides evidence that pedagogical knowledge and everyday knowledge are the mediating elements which can influence the way geography is understood and taught in Chile. This can be interpreted, in the words of Stengel (1997), as a discontinuous relationship between the two spheres, i.e. the academic discipline and the school subject, in which the school subject is structured as polysemic disciplinary knowledge and is perceived by teachers as fragmented. Geography teachers’ subject knowledge would appear to contradict what Young (2008) defines as “powerful knowledge” and sheds new light on the relationship between the academic discipline component and its function for school geography. This is assessed in relation to Chilean teachers’ conceptualisations of Geography, how Geography is understood in Chile, and how these conceptualisations are reflected in what is eventually taught.
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Notes
- 1.
Didactics is dedicated to the study of teacher-content-student relationship in the learning and teaching process of a particular school subject, like Mathematics (Biehler 1994), Natural Sciences (Adúriz-Bravo and Izquierdo 2002) and Geography (Monereo 1997). The way the concept is understood in the English-speaking tradition is different from the way it is understood in Spanish. While English-speaking traditions relate the concept to behaviourist practices, Spanish traditions consider didactics as the pedagogy, the method and practice of teaching. In some cases it is organised according to specific academic disciplines, with a scientific approach (Tochon 1999).
Didactics is understood as an epistemological consideration of knowledge and the teaching/learning processes of scientific knowledge (Benhamla 2012). It focuses on teaching practices and the pedagogical discourse generated about these practices (Galisson 1986), which in turn generates teaching strategies for a better understanding of a particular discipline (Academia de Lille 2006). It also focuses on the what and on the how of subject content and how it should be taught to reach certain educational goals, considering that what is taught is not a mechanical repetition of scientific knowledge given as certain and valid (Picardo 2005), but specific reconstruction of this knowledge for the school and its’ students (Academia de Lille 2006).
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Salinas-Silva, V., Arenas-Martija, A., Ramírez-Lira, L. (2017). Getting Back to Basics: Is the Knowledge of School Geography Powerful in Chile?. In: Brooks, C., Butt, G., Fargher, M. (eds) The Power of Geographical Thinking. International Perspectives on Geographical Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49986-4_13
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