At Sept. 20, 2019 Fer Hooghuis, our expert for the (high school) didactics of Geography retired and held a valedictory symposium, addressing the positioning of Geography as a discipline both at University and at high school.
During his active career, Fer Hooghuis was a strong proponent of a didactics which teach our pupils and students how to think. His ideas were also clearly expressed in a publication in the journal on International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education. This perfectly suited what I tried to establish with Geography at the Radboud University. Namely, to get away from sheer descriptive and rather superficial geographic knowledge and move towards an engaged science trying to make sense and to understand the complex relationships in our geographically very diverse and contingent world. A science which also critically ask uneasy questions and tries to make a difference. A science which literally practices deliberate and well thought through placemaking. A science which teaches critical and responsible thinking and doing. A science which creates the conditions for ‘deep tinking’.
In general, high school geography and high school geography didactics are not known for their theoretical and philosophical sophistication, but I very much appreciate the endeavour of Fer Hooghuis and his colleagues to change that, not just by teaching thinking skills to pupils, but also by founding the didactics on a more thorough theoretical and philosophical basis. Yes, also teachers need to be deep thinkers.
In this respect, I am a great admirer of the didactical work of Prof. Mirca Dickel, of the University of Jena in Germany, who also once visited the Radboud university in the framework of an event at the Radboud University for further education of schoolteachers. Fer Hooghuis and me, at that occasion, presented how an Action Theoretic Approach in Geography could very well be taught to pupils by the hands-on example of the ‘Soccer Game’. 
This work was very much inspired by the book on ‘Soccer Theory’ by Jan Tamboer, which I can still very much recommend. I was in the audience at Mirca Dickel’s lecture at the German Geography Conference in Kiel this autumn, where she gave a wonderful exposé on ‘The complementarity of Phenomenology and Epistemology in geographical Thinking’ based on a paper she recently wrote in German: Dickel (2019) Zwischen sinnlichem Erleben und sprachlich-rationalem Begreifen [Between sensual experience and linguistic-rational understanding] . Fer Hooghuis would have enjoyed it, as it was a great example of how deep thinking inspires teaching and how teaching helps to develop our ability to think deeply.
We are very confident that Fer Hooghuis’ successor, Joost Penninx, at the Radboud Teachers Academy, will continue on this track and establish a fascinating didactics for Geographical Thinking.
Geography is also often described as an integrative discipline bringing together what is otherwise often studied in isolation. But then, as a small, though very fine, geography department, how do you teach geography within the limitations of a regular bachelor or master programme? That seems to be a sheer impossibility and thus in sharp contrast to the comprehensive ambitions of our discipline. One just cannot address everything, and certainly not if one also seeks to provide in depth knowledge of it. Time to do so would never be sufficient, and also the expertise of the team of our extremely competent lecturers would be totally overstretched.
Applied to the design of a curriculum or a course this implies that in a first step we try to provide a general overview of all the elements, streams of thought, theories, approaches, methods or empirical fields which could be relevant without going in details. In the following steps, we select one specific example, and in a number of hermeneutical steps, students are challenged to deepen the knowledge and understanding of that specific example. The focus on the analytical meta-skills allows students to deal with other topics themselves and allows to leave certain topics out of the curriculum. In this way setting up a high quality geography curriculum becomes feasible without attempting, the impossible, namely to be fully comprehensive. It allows to have the courage to leave gaps…