In the Garden of “Geographic Litеracy”

Abstract

The association of pedagogical activity with the gardening is not a new one. Usually this metaphor presents the teacher as gardener who actively influences the process of natural growth of the plants in the garden (pupils in school). In our paper we present the contemporary geographical education as garden in which the "geographical literacy" is growing as product of mutual efforts of gardener and plants (teacher and pupils). The plants we grow are alive and vital, they possess their own dynamics and this makes it hard to determine and accelerate the process of their growth by the mere will of the gardener and in the way he alone envisions their development.The "geographical garden" and its plants are separated from the environment (other educational subjects) by a fence. As our garden continuously interacts with that environment, the fence is playing a crucial rolefirst to protect the plants from the pests (reduced geography lessons in secondary school curriculum, obsolete school facilities) and second -to provide transparency for innovative approaches and good practices (new information technologies, improvement of organizational culture and behavior). The gardener's goal is to preserve the vitality of the plants (the motivation of the pupils) and to achieve high yields (geographical literacy) by using a number of contemporary tools and instruments (new educational methods and techniques). This paper and the metaphor used aims at providing an improved model of geographical literacy setup and development based on the traditional Bulgarian model.