Teaching Urban Geography for a World in Transition

In an era of rapid urbanisation and global interconnectedness, geography education plays a crucial role in shaping students' understanding of diverse urban environments worldwide. This paper examines how the Singapore lower secondary geography text-book influences students' conceptions of people's lived environments in urban areas. Through photo-elicitation interviews with six Grade 7 to 8 students, this study reveals both the positive contributions and limitations of using textbooks as a primary re-source in geography education. While the textbooks successfully developed foundational geographical knowledge and fostered national identity, they often gave rise to superficial and binary conceptions about urban housing in different global contexts. The findings also highlight the critical importance of teachers in mediating these narratives to provide more nuanced representations of urban places in the geography classroom, while also underscoring the importance of students’ own personal experiences in shaping these understandings. This case study offers broader implications for geography education, particularly regarding how curriculum materials, teacher mediation, and students' personal geographies together shape students' capacity to navigate an increasingly complex and interconnected urban world.

Curriculum · Five themes of geography · Human geography · Narrative · Social geography · Strategic geography · Urban geography · Urbanization · Geography Education and Pedagogy · Indigenous and Place-Based Education · Spatial Cognition and Navigation · Urban Studies