Abstract
Spatial thinking, as defined within the general perspective of the National Research Council report, published in 2006, is fairly new in Brazilian geography education. Given this, the study presented here aimed to provide an assessment of the use of tools of representation, in particular maps, as educational resources for the development of spatial thinking in Brazilian Geography textbooks. The study focused on Brazilian middle school, the 6th–9th grades (11–14 year-old students). We analysed the three most-used sets of Brazilian geography textbooks, to assess to what extent the questions in those books are being used to cultivate spatial thinking in the student. For comparison, we also evaluated a set of textbooks used for the same grade levels in France. The assessment, which followed the steps of four American researchers, was based on a simplified version of the Taxonomy of Spatial Thinking of (Jo and Bednarz (2009) J Geogr 108:4–13), which focuses specifically on the evaluation of textbook questions. Through the analysis of 9957 questions, the study identified not only the proportion of questions demanding spatial thinking but also the reasoning processes involved in the questions, providing a considerable amount of data and some relevant conclusions.
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Notes
- 1.
In Brazil, the school system comprises the nine years of elementary school (numbered sequentially from the 1st–9th grades), followed by three years of high school (1st–3rd years).
- 2.
As Brazil is a federation, there is no mandatory national school curriculum. School systems and, ultimately, the schools themselves have the autonomy to decide on the contents taught in each school year. However, there are national benchmark documents, such as those mentioned in this chapter.
- 3.
In France, Geography is not taught as an independent subject in the 6th to 9th grades, so these books are divided into History and Geography sections. The teachers are certified to teach both areas in the 6th to 9th grades.
- 4.
We refer here to Piaget’s (2007) genetic epistemology theory, specifically, the transition between the second level of the concrete operational stage and the beginning of the formal operational stage, which occurs at the ages for which the textbooks analysed here are intended.
- 5.
At the time of this publication, the second cycle of Brazilian elementary referred to the 5th to 8th grades, which correspond to the current 6th to 9th grades.
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Duarte, R.G. (2021). Geography Textbooks in Brazil and the Development of Spatial Thinking in School Students Using Maps and Images. In: Vanzella Castellar, S.M., Garrido-Pereira, M., Moreno Lache, N. (eds) Geographical Reasoning and Learning. International Perspectives on Geographical Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79847-5_14
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