Geography´s Ability to Enhance Powerful Thinking Skills and Knowledge

Finnish upper secondary geography education has faced major changes within the last decade. In 2014, geography lost one of its compulsory courses in the distribution of lesson hours. Afterward, curriculum reforms were conducted in 2015 and 2019, and the geography test in the Finnish matriculation examination was digitalized in 2016. Similar major changes have occurred across the globe over the last 20 years as geography’s position in schools has weakened. Therefore, geography educationists have engaged in discussion regarding the kinds of knowledge and thinking skills that geography encourages young people to learn during their years in school. This thesis acknowledges that geography involves much more than teaching and learning simple facts about world’s topography, regions, and places, which is how geography is usually understood in popular views.

The aim of this thesis is to widen our understanding of thinking skills and powerful knowledge in the context of geography education. Theoretically, the thesis brings together discussions of powerful geographical knowledge with thinking skills and knowledge dimensions from a revised version of Bloom’s taxonomy, and it suggests that these can be used as two “lenses” through which to examine geography. The main objective of the thesis is to examine geography’s potential to engage students in thinking skills and powerful geographical knowledge, using Finnish upper secondary geography education as an example.