INTRODUCTION TO GEOGRAPHY 1

KENYA METHODIST UNIVERSITY

ASSIGNMENT ONE

DEPARTMENT: EDUCATION AND COUNSELLING

TREMISTER: 1ST 2014/2015

PROGRAM: SCHOOL BASED

COURSE TITLE: GEOG 101 INTRODUCTIONS TO GEOGRAPHY

GROUP: GROUP 4

STUDENTS NAMES:

1. MASITSA CATHERINE .T. EDU-1-3670-3/2013

2. GITONGA NGUNYI PURITY EDU-3679-3/2013

3. SIAMPALA JOSEPH LETVYA EDU-1-2619-2/2013

4. MUTUA ANGELA MUTUA EDU-1-3684-3/2013

LECTURER: DR PAULINE MWANGI

TASK: DISCUSS THE EVOLUTION OF GEOGRAPHY FROM 1900 UP

TO DATE
INTRODUCTION TO GEOGRAPHY 2

Geography refers to study of the earth as the home of man and its spatial
discipline that seems to understand patterns on the earth and processes that created
them.

During the first 50 years of the 1900s, many academics in the field of
geography extended the various ideas presented in the previous century to studies
of small regions all over the world. Most of these studies used descriptive field
methods to test research questions. Starting in about 1950, geographic research
experienced a shift in methodology. Geographers began adopting a more scientific
approach that relied on quantitative techniques. The quantitative revolution was
also associated with a change in the way in which geographers studied the Earth
and its phenomena. Researchers now began investigating process rather than mere
description of the event of interest. Today, the quantitative approach is becoming
even more prevalent due to advances in computer and software technologies.

In 1964, William Pattison published an article in the Journal of Geography

(1964, 63: 211-216) that suggested that modern Geography was now composed of
the following four academic traditions:

Spatial Tradition - the investigation of the phenomena of geography from a

strictly spatial perspective.

Area Studies Tradition - the geographical study of an area on the Earth at either
the local, regional, or global scale.

Human-Land Tradition - the geographical study of human interactions with the

environment.

Earth Science Tradition - the study of natural phenomena from a spatial

perspective. This tradition is best described as theoretical physical geography.

Geography’s original characteristics were formulated by a small number of

19th-century French and German scholars, who strongly influenced subsequent
developments in the United Kingdom and the United States. Since 1945, while
retaining its focus on people, places, and environments, the discipline has
expanded and changed considerably. Geography is one of the few academic
disciplines, particularly in Europe, to have been established in universities as a
INTRODUCTION TO GEOGRAPHY 3

result of pressure to produce people who could teach it in schools. As the demand
for geographical information increased, more people required a foundation of
geographical knowledge (Physicalgeography.Net, 2013). There was also growing
recognition of the role geography could play in creating national identities, making
people aware of their particular situations through contrasts with environments and
peoples elsewhere. Geographical knowledge was important to citizenship,
especially if it showed the superiority of one’s own people and environment.

Geography’s links with mercantilism, imperialism, and citizenship were the

basis of claims for geographical instruction in schools. For example, geographical
societies lobbied successfully for their subject’s inclusion in the curricula
associated with universal school education, especially in northwestern Europe.
Specialist bodies, such as the Geographical Association in the United Kingdom,
continued to promote the discipline’s educational role. Sustaining the teaching of
geography in schools required programs to train teachers and institutions where
geographical knowledge could be codified and its scholarship advanced.
Geography needed a presence in universities to give it academic credibility, and
societies petitioned to secure it there. Some of this lobbying was successful by the
end of the 19th century—the height of European imperialism. In Prussia, for
example, a royal decree in 1875 established professorships of geography in 10
universities (Physicalgeography.Net, 2013). In The Netherlands, the Royal Dutch
Geographical Society was founded in 1873, largely to sponsor major expeditions to
the Dutch East Indies. The society’s first endowed chair, at a private university in
Amsterdam, was specifically in “colonial geography.” In Russia, St. Petersburg’s
Imperial Russian Geographical Society promoted the discipline in a variety of
ways, establishing it early at Moscow State University. The Italian Geographical
Society was founded in 1867, following the creation of the first university
professorships in 1859; it too promoted “exploratory” geography and the teaching
of geography in schools.

In the United Kingdom in the late 1880s, after such courses had been
discontinued at the University of London, the Royal Geographical Society
convinced Cambridge and Oxford to provide instruction in geography, with the
society funding instruction for several decades (though degree courses were not
introduced until the 1920s and ’30s). As more British universities were founded,
they too were pressed to provide instruction in geography. At some, private
donations secured the appointment of lecturers. At others, a need for geography
instruction was recognized in cognate disciplines, such as economics, geology, and
history, although few of those appointed to do the teaching had any formal training
in the discipline. This was also the case with the first professors of geography,
INTRODUCTION TO GEOGRAPHY 4

appointed in the early 1930s at Cambridge and Oxford—Frank Debenham and

Kenneth Mason, respectively. Many of the first geography teachers were located in
departments of disciplines that introduced geography teaching, but as the demand
for courses grew—mainly from students who intended to teach the subject in
schools—separate geography departments and degree programs were soon
established. By 1945 there was a geography department in nearly every British
university and in many of the universities and university colleges throughout the
British Empire.

It is thus not surprising that these accounts, which reflected the widening
geographical horizon, continued to form the essential part of the histories of
geography down to the beginnings of the 20th century; histories which some
authors now considered part of the history of science, and particularly useful in the
study of the discipline because, as Vivien de Saint Martin wrote: "simply by
following science as it passes through its successive stages one can see the place it
occupies in the general development of humanity". In the second half of the 19th
century, coinciding with the spectacular growth of the scientific community of
geographers, the history of geography turned its attention to new topics. The
resonance of the Historical Essay conceming the Progressive Development of the
Idea of the Universe, which was published in Alexander de Humboldt's Cosmos
(1845-1862), and the development of physical geography, brought to these
histories the evolution of ideas about the physical structure of the world and about
the interrelationship between different natural phenomena. At the same time as
developing a growing interest in human concerns which was to lead to the creation
of a systematic human geography attention was also directed towards the history of
the techniques and procedures used to establish the wealth and population of
countries.

At the same time, the development of a new regional geography in the

second half of the 19th century implied the search for antecedents in order to
delimit the chorographic units. In this respect, certain 18th century geographical
contributions, such as those of Buache
or the geographers of the Reine Geographie, could now be highlighted.
Meanwhile, the issues of the theoretical foundations of the discipline in relation to
other scientific fields led to a study of figures in the past, such as Varenius, who
had reflected on the contents and methods of this science.

From the end of the 19th century, every important theoretical change in the
science of geography, and every debate concerning its foundations and methods,
has been accompanied by incursions into the history of the discipline with a view
INTRODUCTION TO GEOGRAPHY 5

to using arguments from the past to support one or other of the contesting
conceptions. Important theoretical works, like those of Alfred Hettner or Richard
Hartshorne, also contain a historical dimension which seeks to illuminate current
thinking "in the light of the past". Our discipline had a difficult struggle towards
the end of the 19th century in order to achieve recognition in the universities;
moreover, because of its situation at the crossroads between the natural sciences
and the social sciences, it has not only had serious problems with its foundations, it
has also had numerous critics and competitors. This underlies its felt need for a
justification of the discipline and the affirmation of its dignity and independence
from the other natural and social sciences. Introductions to university handbooks as
well as longer and shorter compendia have approached this task, and frequently
there has also been a debate concerning its relations with the sciences that are
adjacent or auxiliary to geography. In general, as in other disciplines, one has
attempted to show the route that has led to modern, truly scientific geography.

However, as one might expect in a subject with ancient roots, a powerful

institutional development, and also a long tradition of historical studies, the
histories of geography that have been written throughout the present century are
richer and more varied. While it is true that a large number are written out of
concern for current issues, there has also been, in past epochs, an important school
of histories of geography that were directly linked to the history of science and the
history of culture: specific research as well as general works on the geography of
the ancient world, of the Middle Ages, of modern times, and of 19th and 20th
centuries. Interest in the biographies and the individual contributions of the most
illustrious geographers has more recently given way to the ambitious attempt to
produce a complete biographical inventory of every geographer who has
contributed to the science, and to a concern to collect the testimony of those still
alive concerning their training and their ways of working.

Emphasis on the origins and evolution of geographical ideas, as well as on

their intellectual and social context, appears again -and with increasing intensity in
certain works that have responded to the call that J K Wright made in 1926, and
they continue, more or less explicitly, the line lay down in the works of Lovejoy.
Anthologies of geographical texts have put at the disposal of students selected
fragments from the most important geographers, in some cases alongside evidence
of the geographical knowledge of other historical authors (poets, philosophers,
theologians, travelers, etc.). The changes that have taken place since 1950 have
caused a fissure in the unity, which the discipline had maintained since the
beginning of the century, based on the acceptance by the whole scientific
community of the regional paradigm and the historicist approach. These changes
INTRODUCTION TO GEOGRAPHY 6

led to new generations of historical works, some of which have sought to recount
the vicissitudes and the protagonists of the transformations that have taken place.
All of this meant, first, greater attention on the present; second, a search for
appropriate antecedents for each revolutionary change; and finally, a greater
attention to geography's relations with the general evolution of the natural and
social sciences, as well as with the general evolution of ideas and of philosophical
frames of reference. It has also reinforced the tendency towards a shortened
chronology of the history of the subject, one that restricts itself to contemporary
geography, that is to say developments subsequent to the contributions of
Humboldt and Ritter, who are solemnly considered by all sides as the fathers of
present-day geography.

The attempts that have recently been made to present in a global form the
discipline's historical development since antiquity faithfully reflect, as always
happens, the authors' standpoint vis-a-vis the changes that have been taking place.
By way of an example, we only need to cite the case of Preston James's work
published in 1972. The different chronology of the changes in different countries
becomes evident if we compare this work with that of the German Hanno Beck
published the following year. While in the latter the quantitative revolution is
totally absent, in the work of James -some 20 years older than the German- we see
reflected both his acceptance of the regional paradigm and also his sensitivity to
the changes that had been taking place in the discipline in its Anglo-American
context. James insists that geography deals with the differences in the earth's
surface (geodiversity) and investigates "what things are combined in different
places to produce the complex characteristics of the world's landscape"; this shows
that James is set in the same line as Hartshorne, that is to say in the conception of a
geography of regions and landscapes. However, at the same time, the allusions to
the mental images, to the importance of relative location, and the statement that
"scientists have formulated many different kinds of explanations to make the
mental images plausible and acceptable, and their explanations, in turn, often
determined what features they choose to observe", all of which demonstrates that
the work was written after the debates of the 1 950's and 1 960's.

One sentence in particular reflects his awareness of, and his reservations
about, quantitative geography: According to him, scientists sought and found
mathematical regularities separate from the processes of change that nevertheless
satisfied the urge to explain the images of geodiversity. In this we see how he
unconsciously reflected his disqualification of those mathematical discoveries
which, faced with the urgency to find provisional solutions, provide only
momentary satisfaction. In other words, we see in him all the dissatisfaction of a
INTRODUCTION TO GEOGRAPHY 7

traditional - though sensitive and open geographer with one of the fundamental
aspects of the quantitative revolution. Thence arises an excellent history, conceived
in a particular place and time (USA, 1970), with a wide perspective, and with great
attention to the most recent developments (in the 1 960's), though at the same time
without renouncing his own viewpoints.

With all this evolution, the history of geography is today an extraordinarily

rich and diverse field, with a long tradition of research carried out within the
discipline. Ever since the first International Geographical Congress in Amberes in
1871, practically all meetings have devoted attention to these topics, usually in
specific sections dedicated to "The History of Geography and Historical
Geography". More recently (since 1968), within the International Geographical
Union a commission devoted to "The History of Geographical Thought" has been
formed; this has stimulated new research, and there have been discussions on
reports of the most varied types: journeys, the history of ideas, philosophical
frames of reference, biographies of scientists, history of the language and methods
of geography, institutions, etc (B.Edu, 2013). As one might expect, in all these
works there is a mixture: of those who approach history from concerns that arise in
current scientific or professional practice, and those whose interest is in history
itself; those who use traditional historical techniques, and those in search of new
ways, using philological, bibliometric or iconographic techniques; those who aim
to set their research in the most general area of the history of science, alongside
those who still see their research as serving to legitimize and dignify the discipline.

 
Currently geographers make use of various tools to teach and learn
Geography. For instance, they make good use of maps, geographical information
system, photographs, and real objects. For instance, the Kenya national
examination council uses photographs to test students on various Geographical
objects. There are also various Geography labs which are used to store useful tools
for teaching and carrying out research in Geography.
In conclusion, the evolution of Geography has resulted in various developments.
For instance, it is included in most countries school curriculum.
INTRODUCTION TO GEOGRAPHY 8

References
Physicalgeography.Net (2013). Introduction to Geography. Retrieved from:
http://www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/1a.html [Accessed: 19 Dec
2013].
B.Edu (2013). The history of science and the history of the scientific disciplines.
Retrieved from: http://www.ub.edu/geocrit/geo84.htm [Accessed: 19 Dec
2013].
William, P. (1964). Modern Geography. Journal of Geography (63: 211-216)