Critical thinking in geography education: is geographical thinking critical?

Abstract

Geography as a school subject offers enormous potential for fostering skills and competences crucial for life in twenty-first century. Yet most Czech geography teachers still lean towards memorizing facts with weak understanding. Why do we expect teachers to teach toward skills such as critical thinking if no consensus over its meaning exists – especially in the context of learning geography? This lack of clear meaning causes not only problems with teaching it, but also fails any attempt at measurment and evaluation. Therefore, the main aim of this study is, to create a unifying taxonomy of critical thinking skills in the geographical context and link these newly founded skills into the geographical thinking concept. To fulfil these goals, we employ existing structural models of critical thinking combined with a thorough literature review. As a result of this study, we present the required set of skills of a critically thinking geographer in higher education and a new perspective on geographical thinking.