Geographic Scholar Knowledge and the linkage between the student’s reality and the study of current topics

Abstract

This article is inserted in the context of curriculum studies based on Theory of Discourse and it debates the views on geographic scholar knowledge that are in dispute for sovereignty by presenting current topics linked to geography teaching in Brazil’s high school (Ensino Médio). Methodologically, it was based on pedagogical and epistemological field analyses, reports from geography bachelor students and teachers’ experiences. Current topics can be defined as events from various social scopes that, as they are widely broadcast by the media, become part of geography classes as instruments and curricular components. When it comes to scholar geography, reality is associated to pedagogizing scholar topics – the student’s reality – and to the conception of geography as the Science of the Present – as a study of reality in the current world. The research’s results point to current topics as a metonymy for reality, creating a meaning of current geographic knowledge articulated to the discourse of geography as the Science of the Present, resulting in curriculum practices based on the teaching of factual events and/or from the development of a geographic reasoning.