Proposal submission

Although in some countries geography remains as an independent curricular subject, in many others the study of geographical issues and problems has been integrated into the wider fields of social or environmental studies.

Curricular reforms are always an opportunity for scholars to engage in lively debates regarding the role and the importance of the traditional disciplines. A time, during which the contents and role of geographical knowledge are often questioned, misunderstood or narrowed. Therefore, it is important to give geography educators a chance to reflect on the conceptual, pedagogical and curricular challenges that school geography faces, in contexts in which alternative bodies of knowledge are freely produced and disseminated.

The symposium will be designed to promote a reflexive debate around some of the following questions:

• How does school geography cope with the challenges of information society?
• What strategies have been adopted as regards the development of geography curriculum?
• What can be currently considered as meaningful and valid geographic knowledge?
• How does school geography address issues concerning the mobility of manpower or refugees?

Participants are invited to submit abstracts for paper presentations and workshops, which can be either research papers and/or examples of best practices on geography education. Proposals should be related to the following domains:

• Curriculum development
• Learning and instruction
• Teacher education
• ICT and information society
• Environmental education
• Education for cultural understanding
• Mobility and migrations

The proposals will be in the form of an abstract — an extended summary of 600-1000 words — structured in accordance with the following guidelines.

The paper presentation proposals should describe the aims, methodology, findings, theoretical and educational significance of the research and references. The symposium programme committee will accept different kinds of papers (e.g. empirical papers, theoretical and best-practice papers).

Please use the template provided bellow.

Paper template

For workshop proposals, we will need the following:

• Title of workshop
• Named facilitator/leader
• Intended outcome and scope of workshop
• Brief description of activities
• Resources or IT support required

Please use the template provided bellow:

Workshop template

All paper presentations and workshops will be conducted in Lisbon during 26 and 27 October 2017. Presentations will take place in concurrent sessions. The time allocated to each format will be:

• Paper presentation (20 minutes)
• Workshops (90 - minute workshop)

Author(s) must submit their abstract(s) online and use the templates provided above.

Please upload the files with your proposals here.

All submitted proposals will receive a notification regarding the abstracts reviewing results (deadline July 30).

Paper's acceptance and inclusion in the Symposium programme is final only after the Scientific Committee decision and the payment of the registration fee (deadline September 30).

Depending on the format and type of research report, the proposals will be reviewed according to the following criteria:

Empirical paper

• Relevance to the symposium theme of Integrating Knowledge and Understanding in Geography Education
• Significance for theory, policy and practice
• Theoretical framework, conceptual rationale or pragmatic grounding
• Research method and design (research questions, context, participants, data sources, sampling, procedure, ethical issues)
• Clarity of results or preliminary results and conclusions
• Overall quality and scientific originality

Theoretical paper

• Relevance to the symposium theme of Integrating Knowledge and Understanding in Geography Education
• Significance for theoretical debate
• Theoretical framework, conceptual rationale or pragmatic grounding
• Embeddedness in relevant literature
• Clarity and robustness of theoretical argument
• Overall quality and scientific originality

Best-practice paper

• Relevance to the symposium theme of Integrating Knowledge and Understanding in Geography Education
• Significance for theory, policy and practice
• Theoretical framework, conceptual rationale or pragmatic grounding
• Validation in domain of application (e.g. as research method, data collecting, research procedure, etc.)
• Quality of the applied format (e.g. activity based or demonstration)
• Overall quality and scientific originality