Geography Teachers' Views on the Revised High School Geography Curriculum

Problems are experienced in geography teaching in almost all countries. Modifications made to curriculums from time to time aim to meet the expectations of the community and the Ministry of National Education in the problematic fields of education. The purpose of the geography teaching is to bring up individuals that are responsible, know their country and environment, have knowledge of the wealth as well as the problems of their country, and that produce solutions for the problems. To this end, geography curriculums are reviewed from time to time, and revised taking into consideration the changing conditions. The implementers of curriculums revised and put into practice in line with the development strategies of countries are the teachers. Consequently, it is important to know the views of teachers and problems they encounter with a view to identifying the deficiencies. The purpose of this study is to determine the views of teachers, who implement the high school geography curriculum prepared in 2005, about the curriculum itself, and to identify the differences of the new curriculum from the classical geography curriculums by manifesting the positive and negative aspects of the new curriculum. Personal characteristics test created by the researcher obtaining specialist opinions, as well as the open-ended questions aimed at determination of some characteristics of the curriculum were used for obtaining data, and also information obtained from face-to-face interviews were utilized. As a result, it is seen that the new geography curriculum has very significant differences from the previous curriculums in terms of the contents and the teaching strategies, methods and techniques, as well as skills. The teachers that are the implementers of the curriculum are of the opinion that the revised geography curriculum places the student in the center, encourages learning by doing, experiencing and exploring, and makes the geography a part of the life itself.