Geografie 2023, 128, 397-418
Geography curriculum fidelity in map-skills development: Examining teachers’ personal concepts, lesson objectives, and observed lessons
, Martin Hanus, Dana Řezníčková
Charles University, Faculty of Science, Department of Social Geography and Regional Development, Prague, Czechia
Received April 2023
Accepted August 2023
Quality education requires teachers to approach the curriculum systematically. Systematicity in education can be viewed from different perspectives. One of these is fidelity across the different levels of the curriculum: planned, implemented, and acquired. The basic premise is that what has been planned should be implemented and mastered. Therefore, transitions between different levels of the curriculum should not trigger unintentional changes in objectives, contents, and so forth. Thus, this study aims to examine curriculum fidelity and systematicity, specifically, the links between the planned and the implemented curriculum, in one specific segment of geography education: map skills. To this end, a combination of observations and recordings of model lessons and interviews was used to research 20 lower secondary school teachers and their lessons. The results suggest little systematicity in the development of map skills, that is, only weak fidelity between the planned and implemented curriculum. Particularly, a fundamental problem was observed in setting the learning objectives of a concrete lesson.
Keywords
curriculum fidelity, map skills, curriculum recontextualization, personal conception of teaching, lesson planning, geography lesson, geography education.
Funding
This study has been supported by Charles University Grant Agency, project GA UK No. 348821: “Teachers’ strategies for developing map skills in lower secondary education”.
