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The school subject of Geography deals with complex issues that involve changes of the Earth systems that human systems are depending of, such as climate change and related key sustainability issues. The subject content requires an understanding of complex multicausal and dynamic relationships between nature, people and societies and span over large temporal and spatial scales. A systems approach has been suggested as a way of dealing with this complexity. This article reports from a design study that examines how different factors in Geography teaching can enable or impede, different aspects of upper secondary students' systems geographical knowing. Furthermore, the article discusses how this knowing can also be seen as aspects of critical thinking in geography. The teaching intervention used a specifically designed system geographical connection model. The purpose of the article is to contribute with four tentative design principles that aim to provide teaching conditions for students to: I) experience the idea of a complex issue in terms of a specific system, II) test and use system geographical concepts for constructing the system, III) examine and anchor the constructed system in place-specific contexts and IV) synthesise, interpret and evaluate consequences based on different perspectives in order to develop critical thinking. With these principles the article contributes with knowledge that teachers can use to organise geography teaching around sustainability issues and discuss how system aspects can contribute to critical thinking in geography. |
