School geography: Institutional aspirations and classroom experiences

Abstract

School geography embodies the attempt of political and academic institutions of systematizing geographical content knowledge: to transform geography in a learning object for the population. The purpose of this article is to highlight the existing differences and similarities in the analysis of school geography. On the one hand, we refer to the curricular framework and to the education system. On the other hand, we deal with the inherent problems of geography teaching in childhood, primary and secondary education. In these contexts, geography contents aim to convey the description of the environment to students that tend to distrust canonical academic discourse, as they consider it to be beyond their understanding. But at the same time, their family and friends consider the description of places and their resources to be at the core of geography.