At Sept. 20, 2019 Fer Hooghuis, our expert for the (high school) didactics of Geography retired and held a valedictory symposium, addressing the positioning of Geography as a discipline both at University and at high school.
During his active career, Fer Hooghuis was a strong proponent of a didactics which teach our pupils and students how to think. His ideas were also clearly expressed in a publication in the journal on International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education. This perfectly suited what I tried to establish with Geography at the Radboud University. Namely, to get away from sheer descriptive and rather superficial geographic knowledge and move towards an engaged science trying to make sense and to understand the complex relationships in our geographically very diverse and contingent world. A science which also critically ask uneasy questions and tries to make a difference. A science which literally practices deliberate and well thought through placemaking. A science which teaches critical and responsible thinking and doing. A science which creates the conditions for ‘deep tinking’.
In general, high school geography and high school geography didactics are not known for their theoretical and philosophical sophistication, but I very much appreciate the endeavour of Fer Hooghuis and his colleagues to change that, not just by teaching thinking skills to pupils, but also by founding the didactics on a more thorough theoretical and philosophical basis. Yes, also teachers need to be deep thinkers.
In this respect, I am a great admirer of the didactical work of Prof. Mirca Dickel, of the University of Jena in Germany, who also once visited the Radboud university in the framework of an event at the Radboud University for further education of schoolteachers. Fer Hooghuis and me, at that occasion, presented how an Action Theoretic Approach in Geography could very well be taught to pupils by the hands-on example of the ‘Soccer Game’. 
This work was very much inspired by the book on ‘Soccer Theory’ by Jan Tamboer, which I can still very much recommend. I was in the audience at Mirca Dickel’s lecture at the German Geography Conference in Kiel this autumn, where she gave a wonderful exposé on ‘The complementarity of Phenomenology and Epistemology in geographical Thinking’ based on a paper she recently wrote in German: Dickel (2019) Zwischen sinnlichem Erleben und sprachlich-rationalem Begreifen [Between sensual experience and linguistic-rational understanding] . Fer Hooghuis would have enjoyed it, as it was a great example of how deep thinking inspires teaching and how teaching helps to develop our ability to think deeply.
We are very confident that Fer Hooghuis’ successor, Joost Penninx, at the Radboud Teachers Academy, will continue on this track and establish a fascinating didactics for Geographical Thinking.