ABSTRACT

Geography translates literally as ‘writing the world’ or ‘earth description’: it is the world subject according to Alastair Bonnett (2008). The key purpose of geography is that it attempts to comprehend the world as a whole. In school, it is helpful to imagine the subject as a resource for helping us respond to questions arising from fundamental human curiosities about the world in which we live — questions that all children ask in some form or other. Such questions are, arguably, ultimately to do with survival in ‘our home on planet earth’. The examples that follow below are derived from Howard Gardner's discussion of curiosity and subject knowledge (Gardner and Boix Mansilla, 1994). We have organised these into four groups which roughly speaking align with physical geography, human geography, place-based geography and welfare (or development) geography:

What is this place made of?

Why do things move?

What becomes of things?

Who am I?

Where am I from?

Who is my ‘family’?

Who are those people — where are they from?

Where do I belong?

What is this place like?

How did it come to be like this?

How might it change?

Who gets what, where and why?

What is fair?

What is sustainable?