An Educational Approach to Landscape

A special issue of Education Sciences (ISSN 2227-7102).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 January 2021) | Viewed by 9697

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Ciudad Universitaria de Cantoblanco, 28049 Madrid, Spain
Interests: education; landscape; geography teaching; curriculum; climate change learning

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The aim of this Educational Sciences Special Issue is to show different ways of understanding, participating, and assessing the landscape from education. It has now been twenty years since the European Landscape Convention (2000), yet there is still hardly any evidence of educational designs for learning about the landscape. Landscape learning involves developing various emotional and cognitive geoabilities, as well as skills in students and citizens, in general.

Emotional capacities are found in the acquisition of sensitivity and appreciation of the different landscapes of the world and their diversity. These capabilities involve the development of citizens committed to the world, where environmental education and sustainability are key factors for landscape conservation.

For the deep and committed development of these emotions, knowledge of landscapes must be promoted. In this sense, we must identify and understand the climatic evidence and its consequences on the fragility in mountain landscapes and the imbalance in the oceans. For this, it is necessary to assess human features in the territory and their influence on urban dynamics and the incidence of migratory movements in rural and urban landscapes.

The focus of this Special Issue on the landscape is to find the educational roots and promote the scaffold of the landscape in education. The landscape is a diluted content in the curriculum, which needs to be delimited and defined to relate the specific features in order to strengthen ties with other disciplines. The landscape becomes the building axis of knowledge from a global perspective with different dominant features (rural, urban, etc.) and from different perspectives (historical, current, and future). Therefore, proposals for the teaching landscape are sought.

The scope of this Special Issue aims to reach scientists from all areas of knowledge close to the study of the landscape and from its link with education. In this sense, the Special Issue promotes interdisciplinarity with the common axis of landscape and education. Also interesting are the views of conservation and sustainability in human interventions in the landscape, as well as the interaction with other processes linked to wildlife, vegetation, climate, migration, etc.

The purpose of this Special Issue is to seek reflections on human activity in landscapes, educational intervention designs in schools, educational programs for the development of educational action in cities and rural, coastal, and mountain areas and, finally, assessments of didactic programs/activities related to the landscape in schools and universities.

The approach to the landscape from architecture has a long journey (Kvashny, 1982). Since the European Landscape Convention (2000), some educational projects on landscape reading have been promoted through the study of comparative realities (Castiglioni, 2009). However, we are missing proposals for educational designs on landscape learning/teaching, for example, relating the role of national and natural parks in education, developing educational programs for teacher training for professional preparation on the landscape, structuring the landscape as the core axis of the curriculum to relate it to other contents in all educational stages, etc.

Dr. Alfonso Garcia de la Vega
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • Landscape teaching
  • Landscape curriculum
  • Landscape and climate change
  • Landscape and archaeology

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Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

20 pages, 935 KiB  
Article
Design and Initial Validation of a Questionnaire on Prospective Teachers’ Perceptions of the Landscape
by Rubén Fernández Álvarez and José Fernández
Educ. Sci. 2021, 11(3), 112; https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci11030112 - 9 Mar 2021
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 2962
Abstract
This research focuses on the design, construction, and validation of a questionnaire that seeks to analyse the perception of the landscape amongst undergraduates studying for a Degree in Primary School Teaching at Salamanca University. The process has involved using both qualitative and quantitative [...] Read more.
This research focuses on the design, construction, and validation of a questionnaire that seeks to analyse the perception of the landscape amongst undergraduates studying for a Degree in Primary School Teaching at Salamanca University. The process has involved using both qualitative and quantitative techniques to test the content’s validity and the construct’s reliability and suitability through the participation of a panel of expert judges and a sample of 432 subjects. This has been followed by the introduction of an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) of the data provided by the cohort that has led to a study of the questionnaire’s core characteristics, a reduction in its size, and the validation of its pertinence. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue An Educational Approach to Landscape)
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16 pages, 1589 KiB  
Article
Discovering Unwritten Stories—A Modular Case Study in Promoting Landscape Education
by Shaun Tyan Gin Lim and Francesco Perono Cacciafoco
Educ. Sci. 2021, 11(2), 68; https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci11020068 - 9 Feb 2021
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 3294
Abstract
Landscapes have been and are an important aspect of any society, culture, economy and environment. Besides the role of landscape and Landscape Sciences in these arenas, there have been increasingly greater calls to incorporate landscape into the curriculum. Moreover, Landscape Education is beneficial [...] Read more.
Landscapes have been and are an important aspect of any society, culture, economy and environment. Besides the role of landscape and Landscape Sciences in these arenas, there have been increasingly greater calls to incorporate landscape into the curriculum. Moreover, Landscape Education is beneficial in developing important foundations in students, particularly that of active citizenry. While the benefits of Landscape Education are evident, current research remains focused on Western, especially European, contexts. This article discusses how a leading Singapore public University incorporates Landscape Education within a relatively new module on Toponymy offered in the Linguistics and Multilingual Studies Programme. While the links between Linguistics and a course in Toponymy or even the links between Toponymy and Landscape may not be immediately apparent, an analysis of the content covered in the module demonstrates congruence to existing frameworks and principles in teaching Landscape Education and, at the same time, provides a case in point in interdisciplinarity, drawing from diverse disciplines such as Language, Linguistics, History, Geography, Landscape Sciences, Anthropological Linguistics, among many others. This study provides useful references for educational institutions in incorporating Landscape Education into their curriculum. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue An Educational Approach to Landscape)
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17 pages, 1150 KiB  
Article
How Long Has It Taken for the Physical Landscape to Form? Conceptions of Spanish Pre-Service Teachers
by Alejandro Gómez-Gonçalves, Diego Corrochano, Miguel Ángel Fuertes-Prieto and Anne-Marie Ballegeer
Educ. Sci. 2020, 10(12), 373; https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci10120373 - 10 Dec 2020
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 2473
Abstract
This paper analyses the conceptions of a group of students about geological time and its relation to physical landscape formation, focusing on the frequency and rate of a number of geological processes that have shaped our planet over time and that are involved [...] Read more.
This paper analyses the conceptions of a group of students about geological time and its relation to physical landscape formation, focusing on the frequency and rate of a number of geological processes that have shaped our planet over time and that are involved in the formation of the current relief. Data were collected by means of a questionnaire that was administered to 199 university students from a Spanish public university. A total of 185 of them were pre-service teachers and 14 were geology students. Results demonstrated that pre-service teachers had trouble correctly answering questions about the current relief, but especially those questions related to landscapes throughout the history of Earth. Data analysis was done, taking into account pre-university students’ tuition, and results showed that those who had taken a high school branch of sciences and technology obtained better results than those who had taken a humanities and social sciences branch. These latter also obtained better results than those who had taken arts as a high school branch. Furthermore, pre-service teachers had difficulties mastering mid-time magnitudes, which ended up making it difficult for them to understand how the physical landscapes were formed. Finally, from the obtained results, some curricula implications are discussed. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue An Educational Approach to Landscape)
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