This section outlines the skills and concepts that will be developed as children are engaged in geographical work. In general, these skills and concepts should not be taught in isolation. While occasional lessons will focus on some specific skills (for example on the reading and use of mapping techniques), the skills and concepts included in the section should be developed through the topics outlined in the content strands of the programme.
A sense of place and space
Two crucial concepts acquired through geographical education are
- the child's sense of place
and - his/her understanding of spatial relationships and location.
A sense of place
A sense of place refers to the child's appreciation and understanding of the distinctive characteristics of a place. This involves the distinctive contribution made by the people who live in a place, the human and natural features to be found there and the interactions of all these elements. This sense of place develops first in relation to the child's own home and immediate surroundings but then extends to include wider environments. These are experienced either directly through visits or indirectly through television, films, books, poetry, stories or other media. The child's sense of place also encompasses his/her attitudes to places and people, the sense of belonging and security in his/her home place and the attitudes he/she displays towards people and places in other areas.
The section A sense of place and space summarises the contribution which the strand units of the curriculum may make to the child's developing sense of place at each level.
A sense of space: spatial relationships and location
If we are to move around and operate efficiently in an environment we must have some notion of the places within it, how they are located relative to each other and how we may move from one location to another. This knowledge which a child or an adult has of his/her environment is usually termed a cognitive map. It is not a map in the conventional sense but is more akin to a mental model of the environment. It contains information about the places with which the person is familiar and other areas further afield, the spatial relationships between these and details of travel between them.
Cognitive maps are incomplete and selective. Their level of detail is influenced by a person's experience of the environment, his/her interest in certain areas over others, and by cultural and other factors. However, they are an essential component in understanding and operating in an environment and their development is a natural part of the child's growth and maturation.
Developing a cognitive map
Among the most basic tasks which young children must accomplish are the development of a sense of themselves as different from the physical world and the acquisition of knowledge about where places and objects are located in the world.1 Both of these developments begin with the very earliest explorations the child makes in the home environment and considerable progress will have been made by the child by the time he/she comes to school.
Pre-school children come to realise gradually that they are distinct from the objects and features around them. However, even as they develop an awareness of a boundary between themselves and the external world, the boundary can remain blurred. They can continue to believe that some objects are linked to their own lives (a common example is the belief that the sun or moon follows them around), and they often assume that objects can have feelings and abilities of their own (for example, that clouds decide to move or that the stream wants to run down the hill). Many of these features will persist in the child's thinking when he/she comes to school.
Concurrent with their development of a boundary between the internal and external worlds, very young children begin to develop representational spatial thinking, i.e. the ability to retain the image of an object, feature or event when it is no longer present. For example, they will demonstrate the ability to go to another room in the home to retrieve a toy which was used earlier. Initially, this ability is developed in the context of the home and is then extended to the other areas with which the child is familiar. At this stage the existence and location of objects is still defined in relation to the child or perhaps its home so that the child may be unable to relate objects to one another.
Children will continue to refine their understanding of the nature of the external world and develop their knowledge of the location of its features throughout their school lives and beyond. This process is dependent upon access to a broad range of environmental information: from direct experience through visiting and exploring areas, and indirectly from oral descriptions, television, photographs, maps and other media. Gradually, children will understand that objects and places exist without them being present and a concept will be acquired of the relative location of objects and places to one another.
This knowledge of places and their relative locations tends to develop in a cluster fashion. Children can develop detailed cognitive maps of a number of areas such as the home, the school, local shops and the home of a grandparent, but are unable to link these together. Eventually, when the child is able to visualise an area and relate its parts to the whole, he/she may be said to have developed abstract spatial reasoning.
In order to develop a cognitive map direct experience is essential. Children's pre-school experience will vary greatly. It may be limited by their own environmental background and such features as the growth of car usage. It is important, therefore, that activities in exploring the environment provided by the school complement the child's previous experience. In this way a broader variety of locations and movements will form an effective basis for the development of cognitive mapping skills.
Geography and the development of cognitive maps
The skills section A sense of place and space is designed to highlight opportunities for fostering the development of children's cognitive mapping abilities.
In the infant classes and in first and second classes, children should have opportunities to visit and explore the features of their local area. The discussions that arise should be used to help the child refine and use simple locational terms. Remembering and describing journeys such as those from the classroom to the school office, around the school, from home to play spaces and longer journeys in the environment can further enhance the child's understanding of his/her space. So too can the giving and using of simple directional information.
As children in third and fourth classes and in fifth and sixth classes explore and learn about physical and human features in the local environment, in the county, in Ireland and in other parts of the world the range of environmental information which they acquire will grow. Direct experience of the environment will remain an essential component in developing their cognitive map of the locality and county, but the use of maps, photographs, models, globes, video recordings and other sources should enable them to incorporate some experiences of wider environments into their cognitive maps. Cognitive maps of the locality should become well developed so as to include an understanding of the main features of the area, their relative location and inter-relationships. However, the details of children's cognitive maps of wider environments will be less sophisticated.
Maps, globes and graphical skills
This section is concerned with graphicacy, i.e. the representation of geographical information in ways which do not rely primarily on linguistic or numerical methods. Among the techniques involved are maps, plans, globes, models, graphs, charts, computer models, sketches and photographs.
Maps and globes
The use of maps, which record and make accessible information about places and their spatial relationships, is one of the key characteristics of geography and is a basic skill which adults and children encounter in everyday life.
Understanding and using maps involves the simultaneous use of a number of concepts and skills: in particular an understanding of aerial perspective; the use of symbols, scale and co-ordinates; and the ability to recognise features on the map and then link or align them to their real equivalents in the environment. Because of the complexity of some of these skills, it has been argued at times that map work is inappropriate for all but the most senior of primary school pupils. However, more recent research has shown that many mapping concepts, including the notion of perspective, the recognition of symbols and the use of coordinates, may be developed in quite young children if examples are drawn from familiar settings.2 It should also be noted that although map reading and construction involve the use of all of these skills, the skills need not be taught simultaneously.
Map work in the primary school will range from the earliest drawings of familiar places completed by infants to the construction of plans and simple maps and the use of a variety of scaled maps, atlases and globes. Work on aspects of natural and human environments will provide the context and need for this development of mapping skills. The curriculum outlines how progressively more complex mapping concepts may be introduced at each level and how these may be developed and applied both in the reading of maps and in their construction.
Other graphical skills
Children should have access to and use a wide range of other graphical skills. Aerial and satellite photographs have a close affinity to maps and, although they are expensive to obtain, children from first class onwards should have opportunities to examine and compare them with maps of the locality and other areas. Simply constructed models will enable children to record information about environmental features encountered in geographical and historical explorations in the locality. Making models can be particularly helpful in fostering children's spatial understanding and cognitive maps.
Graphs, charts and pictograms are further examples of graphical representations. The detailed scheme for the development of skills in the use of these is contained in the mathematics curriculum and is also included under 'Recording and communicating' in Geographical investigation skills.
Geographical investigation skills
This section mirrors that entitled Working scientifically in the science curriculum and is included in the geography curriculum to emphasise the importance of using investigative techniques and critical thinking skills in the exploration of features and events in natural and human environments.
At each level a range of skills is outlined. These statements emphasise the role of the child as an active participant in the exploration of his/her own environment and seek to encourage the development of acute observation, the recognition of patterns, systematic investigation and critical interpretation of data. These techniques, in which all scientists engage at different times, are used by geographers when they investigate various environmental features in fieldwork. Geography lessons provide an ideal opportunity for the development and application of these skills.
Opportunities for the use of these skills exist in all the strands of the geography curriculum. For example, during the exploration of natural landscapes children will collect a range of natural materials and these may be examined, sorted and classified and the findings recorded using these investigative skills. The relationships between soil types and the flora to be found in an area, the analysis of weather observations and simple efforts at forecasting will provide further applications. Similarly, the collection of data on traffic flows, methods of transport, and information on where and how people live and work, will involve skills of observation, data collection, the recognition of patterns, interpretation and communication.
A detailed discussion of the development of these individual skills and the concepts associated with them is contained in the Teacher Guidelines for Science and need not be repeated here. The exemplars which are included in the pages of these sections in the geography curriculum indicate how each skill can be applied in a geographical context.