Dealing with Growth: Demographic Dynamics and (Un) Sustainability in Geography Textbooks

Abstract

Demographic dynamics is one of the core topics of (school) geography fostering both the development of geographical skills and cross-curricular purposes such as Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). The aim of this paper is to map the representation of demographic dynamics in lower secondary geography textbooks. A sample of twenty textbooks from the federal state of Bavaria (Germany), Romania, and Mexico were subject of text analysis. The results show that demographic dynamics serves primarily the purposes of geographical skill development while its contribution to ESD remains limited. The comparative analysis also showed that few of the textbooks display a consistent network of concepts that is able to support skill acquisition. Students might also get easily lost in scalar transitions. Thirdly, most textbooks display a strong normativity and contribute to constructing otherness.