Teachers’ Interests in Geography Topics and Regions – How they Differ from Students’ Interests? Empirical Findings

Abstract

Teachers’ interest is a key influencing factor in geography class, development of curricula and writing textbooks and only little is known about it. A cross-sectional study along the lines of interest theory originating from educational psychology was carried out in Germany in the summer of 2015, in which 141 teachers at secondary schools completed a questionnaire about their interest in geography topics and regions. At the same time, 3400 students (ages 10-17) were surveyed. Teachers show high interest in a broad range of geography topics. They are very interested in natural disasters and topographic topics whereas there is only little interest in several traditional topics from the field of human geography. The significantly higher interests of teachers only partially correspond to those of students (e.g. natural disasters). Teachers have a high interest in (in descending order) the greater regions of Germany, Europe and outside Europe. Among students, regions outside Europe are placed first. Both groups show high interest in Western countries and low interest in Eastern regions on all scale levels. Gender turned out to be the most influential factor in interest, however not in the total amount of topics but rather in the subscales and individual topics and regions.