Background: The view on geography as a school subject has, in Sweden, been rather traditional. That has resulted in Swedish students being familiar with regional geography but not as much with other parts of geography, especially the man-land traditions (Molin, 2006, 78, 116).
Aim: To look at in what ways the status of geography come into play when the national curricula and syllabus for geography is decided upon in relation to sustainable development.
Method: Document analysis on documents produced in two revision processes as well as the current curricula and syllabus in geography and complementary interviews. The documents and interviews have been analysed through thematic content analysis.
Preliminary results: Since Swedish human geographers are not that visible when it comes to research on education there are knowledge gaps that needs to be addressed. An example of this is when representatives from the Swedish National Agency for Education, during a planned revision for the Swedish secondary school, presented a new subject called “Sustainable Development”. As a consequence of this suggestion, the geography subject had been removed from the curricula (Östman 2004). In the end, the entire revision fell through and a new curricula and syllabuses went into force in 2011 where geography was included (Swedish National Agency for Education 2013). Related to this could be that pupils do not have a deep understanding of geographical processes and concepts, i.e. a geographical language as shown by Dessen Jankell, Sandahl and Örbring (2021).
Preliminary conclusions: If we are not able to teach pupils about geographical processes including sustainable development and concepts we risk them not being able to participate in discussions. The geography discipline is well equipped for the task but we need perhaps to be better at conveying these methods and concepts in the school context e.g. to support teachers. As one respondent involved in the process put it “We have the tools!”.
Mots clés : Subject of geography|Sustainable development|Geography syllabus|Education for Sustanability|Status of geography
A104129HF