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.