Chapter One - Introduction

Understandings of what constitutes the discipline of geography have changed over time and across societies and cultures, not least during the twentieth century, which saw the rise and fall from prominence of, inter alia, regional geography, quantitative geography, systemic geography, and Marxist geography.  One common strand that runs through these various schools has been, of course, that geography concerns itself with studies of spatial relationships, and the inter-relationships of man with his environment.  Geographical thought, then, is at times analytic, at times comparative, and at other times inferential, though all the while being essentially visual-spatial in nature.  Thus, more than thirty years ago, Tuan (1974) had already observed that "in our mobile society, the fleeting impressions of people passing through cannot be neglected.  Generally speaking, we may say that only the visitor (and particularly the tourist) has a viewpoint; his perception is often a matter of using his eyes to compose pictures [emphasis added]". (p. 63)

The research described in this thesis concerns itself with an investigation into these unique viewpoints, perceptions and pictures, that adolescents form and share about their local environments.

For the most part, geographical fieldwork focuses on the collection of empirical data about environmental variables as diverse as stream velocity and the demographic profiles of commuters.  Such data are then used to inform the design and implementation of projects from the damming of rivers for hydroelectric power, to school-reports.  The field interventions described in the present study differ from these, in that the focus is specifically on investigating the features in the environment in which meaning is invested by the adolescent participants themselves – that is to say, the focus is not on the gathering of field-based data, but on the surfacing of environmental symbols and features which are perceived by adolescents to be of geographical relevance in the first place.

I have chosen this focus in order that insights might be gained with respect to how spatial relations are organized in their minds.  Catling (2005: 74), for example, has described how the understanding of maps comprises two key aspects, namely environmental mapping skills and map reading skills.  Of the two, only the latter – map reading skills – are explicitly taught in the formal geography curriculum in schools in Singapore.  

Through the present study, my aim is to investigate how the former – environmental mapping skills – can be enhanced (and therefore brought subsequently to bear in the so-called ‘map reading’ component in the formal geography curriculum) through specific field-based tasks.  The two components of environmental mapping skills are environmental awareness and wayfinding.  Catling defines the former as involving “the capacity to discriminate between useful environmental cues and non-relevant ones”, while according to Jul (2001: 55), wayfinding can be modeled as a “problem-solving and decision-making activity, in which participants determine a sequence of actions which will lead to a desired goal, including discovering what options are available and deciding among them”.

These options of wayfinding are “sequences of locomotional steps” believed to lead from the present location to the intended destination.  In cases when the intended destination is beyond the individual’s immediate vista space, then the sequences of steps are subdivided into a set of intermediate locations.  The order of traversing these intermediate locations is known as the route.  Wayfinding is thus particularly helpful in enhancing map understanding in that it facilitates the construction of cognitive maps (the term ‘cognitive maps’ was first coined by Tolman (1948), and has been defined by Peuquet (1998: 49) as “the cognitive representation of geographical-scale space”).

One application of the research to effective teaching practice would thus be to inform how the spatial intelligence of adolescents might be augmented by their participation in learning interventions in the field, as well as in class.  In this way, it is my hope that the teaching of map reading – which is at once a basic skill of geographical literacy, yet also one of the hardest for learners to acquire – might be more effectively bridged and mediated.  This contention is supported by Catling (2005: 80), who has argued that “there is a strong link between children’s environmental experience and the development of their environmental mapping skills, which has a positive impact on their development of map reading ability”.

-> 1.1 Methodology