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Childhood Spatial and Environmental Learning

Understanding the spatial and environmental learning of children is a critical task for geography as well as several subdisciplines of geography. This entry presents some of the important developmental issues related to the spatial cognition and environmental learning of children and examines some of the implications for pedagogy.

Challenges in Teaching Young Children

Young children who are just starting school can have a difficult time with multidimensional information. Children of this age have shown some difficulty with cartographic-scale spaces (extensive spaces such as large regions, nations, continents, and the world) as well as with making transitional judgments between large- and small-scale spaces. Young children have shown limits in their ability to process and store information, an issue that must be considered when developing appropriate activities in any subject area.

Initiating geographic learning from the immediate and the visible allows the child to conserve cognitive resources that might otherwise be required for visualization of the problem or environment. Teachers and developmental researchers can often be surprised by the insights that children exhibit when given time to consider more deeply a specific spatial or geographic problem. Starting from a basis that is familiar to the child will help that child pursue more complex concepts than would be possible in abstract or foreign situations. Using a small number of geographic skills and concepts to start with, the teacher can help children develop an understanding of geography from perspectives that young children can easily grasp. The cumulative accretion of knowledge is essential; once the building blocks of geographic knowledge and problems solving are laid down, more complex concepts and skills can be introduced.

The majority of cognitive development occurs during early and middle childhood. Much of the material for later development has its foundation in cumulative knowledge based on earlier development and learning. Once the fundamental geographic concepts are introduced to teachers, opportunities to ask geographic questions and discover the answers flourish. Many of these techniques rely on a geographic basis of knowledge and can first be introduced through lessons and activities associated with maps and aerial photographs. Once a basis is established, students are well prepared for more advanced geographic topics that will produce geographically literate people.

Developmental and Learning Theories

The basis of environmental and geographic learning is established during childhood. The way children acquire geographic knowledge is quite distinct from the way humans learn as adults, and it shapes the nature of their geographic understanding and how they experience the world. Both developmental and learning theories play a meaningful role in the understanding of children's geographies and the nature of childhood spatial learning. From a developmental point of view, it is important to consider the range of abilities a child of a certain age might possess while selecting appropriate content and methods for communicating that content and facilitating learning.

Consideration of developmental issues is only part of the picture; learning theory must also be considered. Although the consideration of learning theory is important from the onset of education, it begins to usurp developmental issues around the age of 12 or 13. By this time, the majority of cognitive skills have emerged, and students begin to rely on problem solving and knowledge acquisition as the main tools for developing intelligence and understanding. Furthermore, working memory capacity, cognitive processing, and attention have all reached levels equal to or near those of adults. Although there are many other developmental issues beginning to emerge at this time (puberty, social developmental, etc.), the majority of the cognitive systems are close to completely developed (allowing for individual differences in rates of development and the emergence of cognitive abilities).

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