Desarrollo del pensamiento geográfico: un desafío para la formación docente en Geografía.

Abstract

Geographical thinking development is one of the main current topics in geography education. Though, according to the scientific literature, this is key for educating geographically informed citizens, empirical studies on the subject in geography teacher training are limited. This paper reports the results from a case study that examined some categories that may help evidence the development of geographical thinking. For this study, a sample of 45 students from the Geography Teaching Program of the Federal University of Goías, Brazil, was selected. The research method consisted in analyzing the contents of learning activities developed by these students during their teaching practice. Our findings showed that the learning activities contain items that, according to Vigotsky, may favor concept understanding and high-level thinking development, with an emphasis on geographical thinking processes.