J-READING Journal of Research and Didactics in Geography

Teaching Geography facing current and future challenges. Cross perspectives. Introduction

Fabio Fatichenti — 2025-06-24

The teaching of Geography, like all other school subjects, changes in whole or in part according to the new challenges and issues that scientific Geography has to deal with (Bagoly-Simó, 2021; De Vecchis et al., 2020; Giorda, 2019; Shin and Bednarz, 2019; Legardez and Simonneaux, 2011). Despite this, national programmes or guidelines are sometimes lagging behind in transposing both the progress of the reference science and the issues arising from social, economic and political changes. And what about the transposition of these programmes into the proposals of school textbooks? (Charpentier and Fatichenti, 2023). This said, although “we are all geographical beings” as stated by Joublot-Ferré (2018, p. 10) and “Geography’s objective as a social science is to study the relationship between societies and the space around them” (Collectif, 2020), what kind of teaching do we want to offer to the students of today’s primary and middle schools? Should this teaching practice evolve? How and under what conditions? For what purposes? As a rule, in many countries school curricula are developed by joint committees. But what is the opinion of geographers in this regard, assuming they take part in these committees?

Mapping Hybrid Spaces in Geopolitics: A Post-Representational and Experiential account

Luca Mazzali — 2025-06-24

Can the visual promotion of an academic event serve as an opportunity to implement a sequential, multidisciplinary map-making process? This article details the creative and scholarly exercise behind the map featured in the poster for the conference “Hybrid Spaces: Where Peace and War Overlap”, held in Rome in early February 2025. It begins by examining the epistemological assumptions explored in the preliminary stages of map-making - namely, the effort to map the hybrid nature of a political space while transcending the binary logic that has long dominated geography, one that maps have reflected throughout history. The discussion continues with an overview of the cartographic influences that inspired the creation of said map, as well as the rationale for selecting a particular political space as its focus.

Images and Imaginaries of the Sea. Introduction

Erica Neri — 2024-12-18

This thematic issue comprises several contributions presented during the session on Images and imaginaries of the sea at the IGU Thematic Conference: The Ocean and the Seas in Geographical Thought. Within the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021-2030), the Conference focused on marine spaces as complex and relational geographical “objects” through various focal points. Therefore, the session was committed to dealing with different visual representations of the oceans and their interconnections with other aspects of the natural world.

Ecological sustainability in Austrian and British geography textbooks

Max Elias Meissl — 2025-06-24

This paper discusses and compares the thematic representation of ecological sustainability in the frame of education for sustainable development (ESD) in British and Austrian lower secondary geography textbooks. For this purpose, two textbook series from each of the two countries have been selected and analyzed by using a qualitative content analysis. The findings suggest a topical focus of the Austrian textbook series on the subject of agriculture in connection to resource use, whereas the British sample emphasizes topics related to the Earth’s service function (Maude, 2014). The British textbooks offer a problem-based and contextualized approach to topics related to ecological sustainability, which corresponds to ESD claims. The Austrian textbooks, on the other hand, provide neither sufficient reference to geographical content knowledge regarding climate change and global warming, nor enough contextual information to facilitate a comprehensive understanding of ecological sustainability issues. Both textbook series reveal shortcomings with regard to addressing learners’ experience realms and fail to establish a connection between consumer behavior, production processes and associated negative repercussions on climate and the environment. Finally, all textbooks demonstrate a lack of pluralistic and in particular ecocentric views.