Fieldwork in Geography Teaching: The Case in Hong Kong

Abstract

In Hong Kong, teachers will agree that geography is a lively subject which frequently involves students doing practical work in the actual environments in order to introduce, reinforce and develop both general and subject specific skills; to provide the opportunity for first hand and experiential learning; to allow response to the challenges of different environments; to allow textbook derived knowledge to be sorted, confirmed and clarified; to allow fragmented or compartmentalized knowledge to be integrated into a coherent whole; and to facilitate the development of tacit knowledge (Keung, 1986; Leal Filho, 1993; Lonergan and Andresen, 1988; McEwin et. al., 1996). However, local research indicates that Hong Kong teachers are not keen to conduct fieldwork with their students and that 50 per cent to 75 per cent of the Secondary 1 to 5 geography teachers did not conduct fieldwork for their students (Ip, 1988; Keung, 1986; Wu, 1992). For those who did carry out fieldwork with students, the fieldwork tends to be unstructured and not well organized. We may perhaps barely classify such organization a field teaching technique (Hill, 1976) or simply a ‘Cook’s Tour’ where sight seeing is to take place in the open (Kent et al., 1997).