Physical Geography (Geoscience) Training Manual - ‘Supportive Note
Important task of school geography course is to provide a holistic view of the world. However, neither school curriculum nor sciences in general give this idea, because a unified knowledge about nature is fragmented into a variety of topics, directions, branches, and issues. The internal logic of a school course of geography is such that involves a simple listing of the known facts, without the establishment of spatial correlations and causal relationships; this course is not a system. In order to get good grades in class, schoolboy only has to memorize a lot of information, and therefore the most important regularities of physical geography are behind brackets. The subject of my article is geography curriculum development, i.e. creation of nontraditional training manual for a fundamentally new course of physical geography. Such training manual could give material holistically and in highest possible figurative form, with a minimum of verbal information. For these purposes, I used method of ‘supportive notes’ (by Victor F. Shatalov, who is a pedagogue-innovator developed teaching system with the use of ‘supportive’ reference signals, which are interconnected keywords, symbols, figures and formulas with a brief conclusion). Course of geography that I developed, was conceived in the form of studying the Earth system as a set of five Geospheres: lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, biosphere and social sphere (noosphere). Such approach (except social sphere which pupils study in the framework of social and economic geography) corresponds to high school course of Geosciences. In this paper, I present the result of the selection and arrangement of illustrative material, i.e. ‘supportive notes’ itself. They are 7 sheets on the following topics: Lithosphere (2 sheets: Solid Ground and Composition of the Earth's Crust ), Atmosphere, Hydrosphere, Cryosphere, Biosphere, and Map as the Language of Geography.