Geography Curriculum due to be Released Next Year

The Age, 27 April 2010; The Australian, 27 April 2010

More than 150 geography teachers and field specialists attended a forum in Sydney this week to discuss the draft geography curriculum with the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA).

The draft curriculum, which was put together by Associate Professor Alaric Maude from Flinders University, describes geography as the ‘why of the where’, and that ‘geography answers our questions about why places are like they are, how they are connected to other places, how and why they are changing and how and why their characteristics vary from place to place’.

Teachers of geography, which Professor Maude describes as the ‘study of place’, are seeking to ‘reclaim’ elements of the subject that they feel have been ‘given to other schools subjects’, including the creation and interpretation of maps, which currently sits in the Australian maths curriculum.

Geography teachers also believe that plate tectonics, weather and climate change and water use and management should be removed from the Australian science curriculum and returned to the geography discipline, where they have traditionally been taught.

Professor Maude believes that the geography and science national curricula could be ‘designed to complement each other’. He says that ‘there are areas where it would help if what we were doing in geography was complemented by the relevant science being taught in the same year… We tend to ask different questions about the same things – for example, in teaching sustainability nowhere does the science curriculum look at why do we have unsustainability, what are the causes of that, and how do we explain why we continue to stuff up the environment.’

Professor Maude’s draft curriculum also examines the place of indigenous perspectives in the teaching of geography, and proposes that to engage students’ interest, Australia’s geography should be taught in a global context.

The national geography curriculum is due to be finalised by July next year

 

 

Back to News Page