A Cross-Country Comparison Study on Global Education of Geography Textbooks in High School
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Su, Ting-Yu
Abstract
Advances in technology make people all over the world exceed the geospatial limits. With different kinds of electrical equipment, people communicate and exchange information freely. Each individual is connected with each other. The age of globalization has come. Nowadays education authorities in many countries put a high value on students’ response to globalization. In order to strengthen students’ competence, global education has been promoted. This study compares current high school geography textbooks in China, UK, USA, Japan and Taiwan (Lungteng version and Hanlin version). The comparison is to understand the appearance and the differences of the global education. Besides, the study obtains good elements from them; hope to be helpful for framing and compiling contents in Taiwan geography textbooks. To achieve the goal, this study sorts out three aspects of global education: global system connection, important global issues, and multi-cultural understanding. The three aspects are subdivided into nine separate sections: global governance, global economic development, global connection, fairness and justice, population and distribution, environment and resources, safety and health, culture cognition and appreciation, and ethnic recognition and respect. The Content Analysis is adopted in this study to examine the global education in geography textbooks quantitatively and qualitatively. Texts, illustrations, and activities in textbooks are also examined. The study reveals several facts below. In the part of “proportion of global education,” the Japan edition geography textbook involves the most texts. After that the ratings are: Hanlin version, Lungteng version, the US edition, the UK edition, and the China edition. The section “environment and resources” is mentioned the most; on the contrary, the section ""global connection"" is mentioned the least. Hanlin version and Lungteng version get the balance between the global scale and the home-country scale in texts. The UK edition provides more materials related to human life. The US edition and the UK edition are designed more discussions from positive and negative sides in texts. All geography textbooks place the highest proportion to representational and organizational illustrations. The US edition sets up more questions to guide students to explain or understand illustrations. Activities of “understanding level” are arranged the most. The UK edition lays out more activities that students have to use the Internet resources to deal with. According to the conclusions above, several recommendations are proposed for education authorities, textbook editors, and further studies in the future.
Subjects
globalization
global education
geography textbooks
content analysis
SDGs
Type
thesis
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Loading...
Name
ntu-104-P00228004-1.pdf
Size
23.54 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum
(MD5):72ba384a260b73ddf098606662daa867