This book presents the distinctive theoretical and methodological approaches in geography education in South America and more specifically in Brazil, Chile and Colombia. It highlights cartography and maps as essential tools and provides a meaningful approach to learning in geographical education, thereby giving children and young people the opportunity to better understand their situations, contexts and social conditions. The book describes how South American countries organize their scholar curriculum and the ways in which they deal with geography vocabulary and developing fundamental concepts, methodologies, epistemological comprehension on categories, keywords and themes in geography. It also describes its use in teachers’ practices and learning progressions, the use of spatial representations as a potent mean to visualize and solve questions, and harnesses spatial thinking and geographical reasoning development. The book helps to improve teaching and learning practices in primary and secondary education and as such it provides an interesting read for researchers, students, and teachers of geography and social studies.

The Atlas of rural protocols in the American Midwest and the Argentine Pampas is structured along eight systems of organization: transport and infrastructure, land subdivision, agricultural production, water management, storage and maintenance, human habitation, animal management, land management. Each of these systems possesses a number of organizational types, material components, normative relationships, and spectra of performance, which become available through a manual of instructions for a Suprarural architectural environment. The research is based on a realistic-overriding ethics towards design that operates by abstracting and intensifying unexplored territorial phenomena.

This book analyzes scientific problems within the history of physics, engineering, chemistry, astronomy and medicine, correlated with technological applications in the social context. When and how is tension between disciplines explicitly practised? What is the conceptual bridge between science researches and the organization of technological researches in the development of industrial applications? The authors explain various ways in which the sciences allowed advanced modelling on the one hand, and the development of new technological ideas on the other hand. An emphasis on the role played by mechanisms, production methods and instruments bestows a benefit on historical and scientific discourse: theories, institutions, universities, schools for engineers, social implications as well. Scholars from different traditions discuss the emergency style of thinking in methodology and, in theoretical perspective, aim to gather and re-evaluate the current thinking on this subject. It brings together contributions from leading experts in the field, and gives much-needed insight into the subject from a historical point of view. The volume composition makes for absorbing reading for historians, philosophers and scientists.

«Encuentros, desencuentros, paradojas, revelaciones... instantes que arrastran pequeñas aglomeraciones de polvo y suciedad. El roce con las cosas y entre los seres desprende pequeñas partículas de pelusa, igual que la combustión libera energía. En ocasiones, algunos fragmentos se nos quedan pegados sin que lo advirtamos. Otras los transmitimos, los perdemos, los redescubrimos, los confundimos. El tiempo y el azar los transforman en atolones, formando una extensión nueva, adosada a nuestro cuerpo, capaz de comunicar con él por cauces extraños y desconocidos. Su existencia microscópica, en fin, nos perturba sin saberlo: placeres sobrevenidos, pensamientos nuevos, subidones de tristeza, bajones de euforia... Pelusas calcáreas que se acumulan formando atolones de vivencias, protegidas del olvido, hechas de olvido».

I am very pleased to have been asked by Rod Gerber to provide a preface to such a book. Not least because of the twenty-four chapters, eight are written by former students or colleagues with whom I have worked in the past and whom I still meet at conferences on geographical education. It is with a certain pride and joy that I note the progress which has been made in geographical education both in its day to day teaching and in research, in the twenty years following the end of my term of office as Chair of the Commission on Geographical Education of the International Geographical Union (CGEIUG). My successors, Joe Stoltman, Hartwig Haubrich, Rod Gerber and now Lea Houtsonen, have done much and are continuing to work hard, to foster the development of geographical education. This book is proof, if proof were needed, that the international collaboration in this field, is alive and well, with contributions coming from all the continents (except Antarctica!). It would be a moribund subject that remained unaffected in one way or another by developments on the 'great world stage', as Fairgrieve (1926) would have put it. And, as Rod Gerber shows, the issues of globalisation, of cultural encounters, of differing value systems, of new technologies, of variable economic development and of environmental quality, all feature as topics which influence and are influenced by, geographical education.