Teaching geography in English : let’s do it ?Portée heuristique d’un échec pédagogique

• Main Author: Olivier Milhaud
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: UMR 245 - CESSMA 2017-09-01
• Series: Carnets de Géographes
• Subjects: teaching; english; pedagogy; critical geographies; epistemology
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/cdg/1173

Teaching Geography in English: let’s do it? This article focuses on the failure of a teaching experiment and underlines its heuristic value. In order to teach Geography in English, the teaching methods chosen were supposed to motivate students; they were intended to be interesting and to give confidence to Geography students struggling with English. The article refers back to the institutional reasons behind the development of a course of Geography in English. It then gives many details about the tinkering to the teaching, and it describes the didactic materials used to a) overcome the complexes French Geography students may have about English language and b) briefly introduce them to some aspects of Anglophone geographies. The article questions the failures of the course: are they due to the adopted pedagogy or to the difficulties of the lecturer to motivate mixed-ability first-year students (even though all of them are convinced that it will be easier for them to get a job if they master English)? This paper deals more broadly with the issue of teaching Geography in English to first-year students and to the value of researching our teaching failures. From a broader perspective, our experience invites us to rethink our pedagogical approach with first-year students. A great number of our first-year students consider Geography itself as a foreign language! Hence, it is key to reconsider the place of homework given to students, the exact role of motivation, and to realize how teaching practices of lecturers/researchers fail to assist students in internalizing dispositions towards hard work and autonomous acquisition of knowledge.