L'enseignement de la géographie face aux défis actuels et futurs. Réflexions et propositions.

Abstract

The objective of this article is to seek to renew geography in order to enable all students and therefore future citizens to face current and future challenges they are or will be confronted with. It is therefore about trying to give them the keys to enable them, as Giordan (1999, p. 238) puts it, to make them "capable of debating societal issues, shaping open-minded individuals capable of questioning the world or themselves". With this aim in mind, based on our experience in terms of continuous teacher training in the French Community of Belgium, we have attempted to identify the major challenges, and then to organize basic geographical knowledge at the heart of these challenges, knowledge to be worked on with students to enable them to face these challenges and meet the new needs of a constantly evolving and complexifying society. This notably involves detecting not only the multiple interrelationships between processes by knowing how to change scale, but also the opportunities and threats, the stakes and even the limits of actions to be implemented. However, this much-desired renewal of geographical education cannot be limited to proposing new content. It also implies moving from teaching tools to learning tools, rethinking the approaches to use in order to lead students to be the actors of their own learning. This is the subject of the second part of this article, which notably addresses new digital resources, the development of critical thinking and media and information literacy, as well as a better articulation between school geography and students' experiences outside of school.