The Italian Geographers’ Document on the University Education of Future Primary School Teachers

Abstract

This article describes an important document compiled by a group of Italian geographers who
teach in the Teaching Sciences faculty. Twenty-two university professors in an online community
debated concepts and compared ideas in order to establish content, methods and didactic
approaches to be applied when training Primary School teachers (pupils aged 3-10 yrs.) at Italian
University to teach geography. The geographers involved started from an analysis of the recent
scholastic reform, they discussed the theoretical aspects from the point of view of the current
geographical debate and they decided upon the most efficient didactic approaches for training
teachers and teaching geography to pupils. To this end, it was necessary to give considerable
thought to the epistemological statutes relating to geography and to more active teaching methods,
moving away from an approach based on descriptions and lists, the likes of which are no longer
sufficient for understanding today’s world.