The discourse of geography: Ordering and explaining the experiential world

In New South Wales secondary schools, physics, chemistry, biology, and chemistry have been taught as an integrated subject, Science, since the mid-sixties. Geography remains a separate subject area, with a focus on physical geography in thejunior secondary school. For the most part its discourse is indistinguishable from that used in science (Martin, 1990), the main difference being the absence of experiments to illustrate the scientific world view constructed in introductory textbooks. The most closely related discipline in American high schools would appear to be Earth Science. Geography as explained to junior high school students is very explicit about its goals. One junior high school textbook (Sale, Wilson, & Friedman, 1980, p. 3) states that the primary task of the geographer is to look for "order and meaning in the world." The procedures used to uncover this order and meaning are, first, to "observe and describe"; then, "to group and classify" and finally "to analyse and explain." "Analyse" is further defined as "to seek an explanation." The three stages of the geographer's task can thus be summarized as observing, ordering, and explaining the experiential world. The New Sottth Wales School Certificate Syllabtts hz Geography (Secondary Schools Board, 1984-1985, p. 6) lists the "important questions" geographers ask. These are: