ABSTRACT
In a sense models have always been used in teaching for they are inseparable from communication. Only recently, however, has much systematic attention been given to the use and limits of the various models used in teaching geography. A consideration of this change and its implications is best viewed against the background of developments in science as a whole. Ackerman observes that the progress of science as a whole, has at any time, depended largely on the growing points in a few fertile subjects, which provided salients for the advance of other disciplines. The strategic potential of the subject-salients varied from time to time. From 1910 to the mid-1940’s physics and mathematics were the most active. Chemistry, biology, geology and the social sciences were less favourably placed for advance. What of geography, which has some affinity with both the physical and social sciences? Ackerman’s answer is clear. ‘We have not been on the forward salients in science, nor, until recently, have we been associated closely with those who have. The reasons are not difficult to find. During the early part of this 50-year period … our closest associations were with history and geology. Geological study of that period, and of the thirties, was not among the inspiring growing points of science. The history and geology connections did not correct the predisposition of our scholars … to the deceptive simplicity of geographic determinism’ (Ackerman, 1963, p. 430). As determinism became a less acceptable model of the relations of human societies to their environments, geographers turned with more interest to the social sciences and to the alternative model in possibilism. Only later, in the fifties, was this concern with the social sciences to exert its very considerable influence on geography, but not before geography had undergone an anguished search for a unique identity. Meanwhile in biology, anthropology, genetics, psychology and economics, the applications of mathematical statistics and systems analysis were actively pursued even before the advent of the electronic computer. Only in the last decade have some geographers availed themselves of this extended range of model theory, with its productive concepts and attendant techniques. It is thus not an occasion for surprise that in geography teaching old models still persist, while newer and more sophisticated models and techniques remain untried. Not that all older models are ready for the scrap heap, or that heavy teaching loads and unimaginative examinations do anything but make change difficult and slow.
