Geography and Political Skills: A Case Study in a School of Education

This article is a case study based on the work of a group of students being trained to teach. They design a lesson for 10-11-year-old pupils on geography and education for sustainable development and aim at linking civic and social skills to scientific geography. This goal is changed in this case study when the prevailing idea about elations between school knowledge and “…educations” (citizenship education, environmental education) is put into question: disciplines such as geography are serving the development of citizenship skills in order to promote a critical education instead of a standard one. Furthermore, based on philosophy, history and sociology of science this case study offers alternative ideas of understanding how pupils can become critical citizens. These ideas focus on the hypothesis regarding a general skill often unseen though essential to any critical approach to world problems: which knowledge should be usedwhen? In this perspective, geographical knowledge refers less to “knowing something” than to scientific, collective and linguistic practices specific to the viewpoints of various scientific disciplines, in particular the construction of spatial problems.