Geography is a broad discipline. Everything in this world has its own spatiality. Geography as THE discipline, which studies the spatiality of these phenomena deals with almost everything you could think of. Geography is also often described as an integrative discipline bringing together what is otherwise often studied in isolation. But then, as a small, though very fine, geography department, how do you teach geography within the limitations of a regular bachelor or master programme? That seems to be a sheer impossibility and thus in sharp contrast to the comprehensive ambitions of our discipline. One just cannot address everything, and certainly not if one also seeks to provide in depth knowledge of it. Time to do so would never be sufficient, and also the expertise of the team of our extremely competent lecturers would be totally overstretched.

How to be selective without being reductive?

For this I coined the term ‘exemplary hermeneutic‘ didactics. This is not a totally new idea, but firmly founded in constructivist and critical thinking learning strategies, going back to the philosophy of John Dewey (Richardson, 2003). It is this same constructivist didactical approach, which also forms the basis of Problem Based Learning (Allen, Donham & Bernhardt, 2011) and the Aalborg didactical model (Barge, 2010). Without going in all the details of these approaches, in short, the exemplary hermeneutical method, focusses on developing the constructive meta-skill, with which students can independently explore new fields of knowledge. This is not done by traditional transfer of existing knowledge on all possible topics but by guiding students in experiencing, analysing and critically assessing an exemplary topic, in a number hermeneutical interpretative steps. It thus does not matter which topics are selected to learn how to construct knowledge about and insights in specific (sub)fields of geography. Maybe the student in their later professional life will never be confronted with the same issue again, and will be confronted with totally different problems, but when they have the analytical skills to disclose these new topics and deepen their knowledge about them.

Applied to the design of a curriculum or a course this implies that in a first step we try to provide a general overview of all the elements, streams of thought, theories, approaches, methods or empirical fields which could be relevant without going in details. In the following steps, we select one specific example, and in a number of hermeneutical steps,  students are challenged to deepen the knowledge and understanding of that specific example. The focus on the analytical meta-skills allows students to deal with other topics themselves and allows to leave certain topics out of the curriculum. In this way setting up a high quality geography curriculum becomes feasible without attempting, the impossible, namely to be fully comprehensive. It allows to have the courage to leave gaps…

See further also my general vision on teaching.

References and further reading

Aktan, S. & Serpil, H. (2018) Didactic in Continental European pedagogy: An analysis of its origins and problems. Uluslararası Eğitim Programları ve Öğretim Dergisi. Vol. 8 No. 1, pp. 111-134.

Allen, D. E., Donham, R.S. & Bernhardt, S.A. (2011) Problem-Based Learning. New Directions for Teachings and Learning. Vol. 2011, No. 128, pp. 21-29.

Barge, S. (2010) Principles of problem and project based learning: The Aalborg model. Aalborg University, Aalborg.

Dewey, J. (2004) Democracy and Education. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. Aakar Books, Delhi. But see also: http://www.hf.uni-koeln.de/dewey/30534

Reich, K. (2012) Konstruktivistische Didaktik: Das Lehr- und Studienbuch mit Online-Methodenpool. Belz, Weinheim.

Richardson, V. (2003) Constructivist Pedagogy. Teachers College Record. Vol. 105, No. 9, pp. 1626-1640.