Four Decades of Change in Geographical Education in Finland

Geography teaching has been under constant change over the last decades. Innovations from research in geography and higher education have diffused in school practices in various ways. International trends have been applied to national contexts in cooperation among academics, administrators and school teachers depending on policies and educational systems of the country, time and reform movements. Additionally, individual experts have played an important role in the implementation processes. In this article, major trends in geography teaching connected to national curriculum development are looked into mostly from the point of Finland. Changes from the 1960s to the end of the millennium in Finnish geographical education are compared with those in Great Britain and USA in order to highlight how changes in one country have been mirrored by changes in the others. Conclusions rest on the analysis of national curriculum documents, discussion among geography educators in conference proceedings and articles in scientific journals.