Preferences of geography teachers: classroom vs. field teaching

Abstract

As part of the national project "IT Academy – Education for the 21st Century", different educational methodologies oriented to geography teaching were created for primary and secondary schools in Slovakia. Our research focuses on two methodologies intended for geography teaching at primary schools and another two methodologies for secondary schools. One of these methodologies for primary and secondary schools was oriented to geography teaching in the classroom and the other one to field teaching. The methodologies in the classroom aimed at teaching regional geography while the methodologies for field teaching aimed at the local landscape. Primary and secondary teachers of geography had the option of choosing from the mentioned educational methodologies and use them in teaching process. The educational methodologies were designed so that the teacher has a complete step-by-step procedure according to which the teaching should take place, including worksheets. The aim of this study is a statistical analysis of the choices of methodologies by geography teachers, in terms of content and the environment in which education takes place. The selected methodologies were verified by 64 geography teachers from all over Slovakia, while 32 teachers were from primary schools and 32 from secondary schools. We found that out of the total number of teachers involved, only 23.4% of them chose methodologies oriented to geography teaching in the field. We also studied the reasons why teachers did not prefer field teaching and rather chose classroom teaching. This work was supported by the KEGA agency under the grant number 033UKF-4/2023.