Dominant pedagogies used in three rural geography primary school classrooms in the west coast district

Abstract

The question arose whether the teaching of primary school Geography teachers could be a factor for the declining Grade 12 pass rate in Geography. It is within this context that the researcher decided to investigate the quality of Geography teaching and learning in three rural primary schools in Grades 4 – 6. The theories of Shulman’s (1987) Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) and Koehler and Mishra’s (2009) Technological, Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK) framed this research. Although the Intermediate Phase curriculum provides a general education experience, the teacher needs to adopt teaching strategies that will deliver geographical knowledge, skills and values, which will enable all learners to function effectively and responsibly in space-place and time. A qualitative research design was employed for this study using interviews and observations. Six teachers were purposively selected for this study. These schools are in high poverty rural communities and the medium of instruction is Afrikaans. The data was both inductively and deductively analyzed. The findings indicate that the most used pedagogy by these six teachers was the Lecture Method in combination with the Question and Answer Method. It was found that teachers do not have adequate content knowledge about the different pedagogies. This research was an exploratory investigation into the pedagogies used in Geography and offer three recommendations: recommendations for teaching Geography in rural multi-grade classrooms, recommendations for WCED and further research.