Teachers’ Interests in Geography Topics and Regions – How they Differ from Students’ Interests? Empirical Findings

Abstract

Teachers’ interest is a key influencing factor in geography class, development of curricula and writingtextbooks and only little is known about it. A cross-sectional study along the lines of interest theoryoriginating from educational psychology was carried out in Germany in the summer of 2015, in which 141teachers at secondary schools completed a questionnaire about their interest in geography topics andregions. At the same time, 3400 students (ages 10-17) were surveyed. Teachers show high interest in abroad range of geography topics. They are very interested in natural disasters and topographic topicswhereas there is only little interest in several traditional topics from the field of human geography. Thesignificantly higher interests of teachers only partially correspond to those of students (e.g. naturaldisasters). Teachers have a high interest in (in descending order) the greater regions of Germany, Europeand outside Europe. Among students, regions outside Europe are placed first. Both groups show highinterest in Western countries and low interest in Eastern regions on all scale levels. Gender turned out tobe the most influential factor in interest, however not in the total amount of topics but rather in thesubscales and individual topics and regions.

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