Abstract
The National Curriculum Standards emphasizes field research outside the classroom. Yet the number of teachers who actually engage their students in this activity has declined considerably because it takes too much time to prepare and plan. The author argues that two actions are needed to raise the implementation rate of field research in classrooms. The first approach is to be clear about the value of that research to learning, which cannot be replaced by classroom teaching. Second, prior to taking on a teaching job, teachers need to experience and learn the best practices to introduce, and to strengthen the link between field research and geography content.
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Notes
- 1.
Inquiry survey often occupies an important place in human geography, whereas observation is highly valued in physical geography. There are many levels of inquiry survey, ranging from simple research in which investigator collect data according to the fixed questions to advance research with a task of comparative culture, requiring researchers to view themselves objectively as represented in Ohno’s study (1974).
- 2.
Excursion refers to an activity in which participants visit a local place with a tour guide to observe its geographic phenomena.
- 3.
According to a questionnaire survey of 67 junior high schools in Kagawa Prefecture in 1992, only 15 schools carried out field research, and many merely asked students to read topographic maps (Shinohara 2001).
- 4.
As Teramoto (2002) pointed out, children today draw maps much more poorly than children in the 1980s, showing that their lack of experience of the real world greatly affects their development of space perception.
- 5.
For instance, Toriumi (1990) revealed that first and second grade students could see geographic phenomena only fragmentally in their observation from a school roof, whereas third and fourth grade students could make comparisons between geographic phenomena and explain their spatial relationships. Fifth and sixth grade students begin to recognize and explain geographic characteristics by viewing the entire scene.
- 6.
Every first-year student was obliged to participate in a 1-day field research event at least once a year. This excursion experience offered valuable information in the “Annual Report of Geography,” which compiles findings of outdoor field research. See Ike (2012) for the contents of Tama Senior High School’s Geography A class, which used field research.
- 7.
Nevertheless, according to a questionnaire survey of junior high school teachers in Miyagi Prefecture (Miyamoto 2009), 19 of 128 teachers (15 %) participated in field research when they were college students, among which only 6 teachers (31 %) conducted outdoor field research in junior high school. This shows that the experience of field research in college does not necessarily lead to a high implementation rate in class. There are few teachers with college field research experience, so it might be difficult to generalize this result. However, we cannot rule out the possibility that it has become difficult to implement field research in junior high schools owing to a tightening of conditions for its implementation.
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Ike, S. (2015). The Current State and Issues of Field Research in Japanese Geographic Education. In: Ida, Y., Yuda, M., Shimura, T., Ike, S., Ohnishi, K., Oshima, H. (eds) Geography Education in Japan. International Perspectives in Geography, vol 3. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-54953-6_7
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