The Commission on Geographical Education of the International Geographical Union has stated along their history different documents that serve as a reference on how to carry out the teaching and learning of geography at schools, called the International Charters on Geographical Education. The preliminary documents to the first Charter were founded…

The article investigates the status of geography education in the Finnish national curricula from the 1970s until today. Conceptions of teaching, learning and change in society are traced through curriculum texts; in addition, the ways in which these are applied in the subject-specified aims and content of the geography curriculum are explored.…

This paper explores the occurrence of geographical inquiry in the Australian curriculum since Geography became a high school subject in 1911. In this historical overview, I reflect upon my own experiences of undertaking geographical inquiry during the 1970s and 1980s. Primary school geographical inquiry experiences can be virtually non-existent…

This paper explores how Geography's position in British Columbia (BC), Canada's school social studies curricula has been affected by changes in educational cycles over the twentieth century. The amount of instructional time, the importance assigned to the subject and the content of the subject have varied in accordance with the pre-eminence given…

The formal organisation of science Olympiads in Mexico dates from 1987, when a national contest on Mathematics was held in order to identify a team to represent the country in the International Mathematics Olympiad. In 1991, the Mexican Academy of Sciences ("Academia Mexicana de Ciencias"-AMC) created the National Science Olympiads…

Four Chinese middle school students represented China during the third International Geography Olympiad (IGEO) held in 2000 in Korea and that was the first time for China to participate in the IGEO. In 2005 the China Society of Geography and the Beijing Normal University decided to co-organise the China National Geography Competition (CNGC) for…

The history of intellectual geography competitions for secondary school students in Russia (by that time--USSR) began after World War II, when the Faculty of Geography of Lomonosov Moscow State University started to organise a yearly Geography Olympiad for Muscovite youngsters. Soon, organisers of this Olympiad decided to open it for secondary…

The Olympiad movement has a long history in Estonia, and the national system developed several decades ago. The first Olympiad for gifted and talented students was held in mathematics in 1950. Now there are more than 20 different fields of competition for basic school and gymnasium students. In 2005/2006, Estonian teams participated in 18…

Fieldwork forms a substantial part of the International Geography Olympiad (IGEO) both in terms of time and in the nature of the experience in which participants get a chance to explore the "real world" of the host country. Fieldwork offers young geographers an excellent opportunity to explore the regional and local geography of the host…

Geography teaching has been under constant change over the last decades. Innovations from research in geography and higher education have diffused in school practices in various ways. International trends have been applied to national contexts in co-operation among academics, administrators and school teachers depending on policies and educational…

A change in government in 1984 introduced sweeping reform into every part of New Zealand society. A treasury briefing paper in 1987 "argued that education was not fostering equity, participation, or achievement; that it was marked by "middle-class capture"; and the "inputs" were not producing the "outputs""…

Faced with a complex set of state, territory and federal government policies and regulations, the recent history of education and training in the Australian context has been one of increasing cooperation to find some shared goals and action for the future. This came to a climax in April 1999, when state, territory and commonwealth Ministers of…