PROPOSITIONS FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF A GEOGRAPHIC REASONING:

A SEARCH OF SCHOOL GEOGRAPHY IN BRAZIL

Abstract

The term “geographic reasoning”, in Brazil, gained breadth and centrality in the debate on Geography teaching after the approval of the National Common Curricular Base (BNCC), in 2017. This term, since then, has been frequently used in proposing school curricula in response to these new guidelines of the Brazilian national curriculum. However, the search for guidance through which geographic reasoning is processed predates the BNCC and has been the subject of discussions among Brazilian education researchers for at least two decades. Given the relevance that the term has gained in teaching in Brazil, this article is based on the following questions: Are there, in the field of Geography teaching, epistemically robust proposals that indicate how to develop geographic reasoning in the classroom? And, if they exist, in what dimensions would these proposals contribute to the development of School Geography, especially in response to the curricular changes underway in Brazil? In the search to answer these questions, a bibliographical survey was carried out that identified three proposals for geographic reasoning built from systematic research conducted by their authors: one Belgian proposal and two Brazilian ones. The analysis of these proposals is presented and problematized in this article, to favor the cognitive understanding inherent to the action of reasoning geographically. This action reveals itself to be a didactic strategy based on Geography teaching committed to scientificity, notably when based on the use of a conceptual network epistemically approved by geographic science, in the search for answering a geographic question inherent to a given situation, also, geographic.