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Teaching About Space and Place: Everyday Geographies of Young People Living in the Slums of Nairobi, Kenya

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Recontextualising Geography in Education

Part of the book series: International Perspectives on Geographical Education ((IPGE))

Abstract

In this chapter the results and knowledge from an empirical study and ideas for a lesson sequence are presented. The example of the topic “Everyday Geographies of Young People living in the Slums of Nairobi, Kenya” emphasises the importance of a recontextualisation of geographical concepts for the classroom in order to avoid conveying stereotypes and offering more differentiated perspectives. The study is structured in two parts: In the first part, the perspectives of young people in Nairobi’s slums are assessed using the photo-elicitation method. Building on this in the second part, a lesson sequence was designed and tested in an intervention study to accompany research with students in grade 9 in secondary schools in Germany. The findings from the study outlined in this chapter indicate the potential of the integration of individual and/or subjective perspectives into geography lessons by using the geographical concepts place, emotional geographies and everyday geographies. This case study example shows that ‘Africa’ should not be taught as a homogenous concept but rather that place-based examples and clear case studies must become subjects of the geography lessons.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The discourse on the term ‘slum’ is summed up in Nuissl and Heinrichs (2013).

  2. 2.

    Find information about this method online: http://www.learnalberta.ca/content/sssm/html/placematactivity_sm.html

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Eberth, A. (2021). Teaching About Space and Place: Everyday Geographies of Young People Living in the Slums of Nairobi, Kenya. In: Fargher, M., Mitchell, D., Till, E. (eds) Recontextualising Geography in Education. International Perspectives on Geographical Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73722-1_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73722-1_10

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