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The discipline of geography encompasses both natural and social sciences and has the natural advantage of enabling the study of sustainability from a transdisciplinary perspective. There are great opportunities for geographers to participate in sustainability research. However, while geographers have set sustainability goals, they have rarely clarified the details for reaching those goals. Current knowledge on the relationship between humans and the environment and the methodologies for studying this relationship are inadequate to solve the transdisciplinary questions in sustainability science. Five research areas: geographical processes; ecosystem services and human wellbeing; human-environmental systems; sustainable development; and geo-data and modelling for sustainability are proposed as those needed to help geography achieve sustainability. The key objective of promoting geography for sustainability is to reveal the mechanisms of human-environmental system dynamics. This depends on understanding the processes in the natural and social systems and their mutual feedback as well as clarifying the relationships between the structures, functional characteristics and interactions in the human-environmental systems at multiple scales. The advancement of geography and its methodologies and technologies will provide a more profound understanding of the future. Geographers have the responsibility of promoting the discipline as the key pathway for carrying natural and social sciences towards sustainability.

In this paper, we present some creative writing activities in which three techniques have been used: the comics, the writing marathon, and the lost manuscript. The activities were organised in a rural school, and the participants were some secondary school students. In this study we analysed the organised learning activities and their results. The tasks given, the way of organising the activities, giving positive feedback during the activities, led the students to value the activities as interesting, motivating, challenging, and to continue the writing process outside the school. As a result of applying these three creative writing techniques, the students wrote interesting narrative texts, while their degree of complexity increased by rewriting the texts, this way proving their efficiency. We came to the conclusion that one of these creative writing techniques, well explained by the teacher and correctly applied by the students, stimulated the creative process and gave them the opportunity to be as creative as possible and to create interesting stories in a geographical area described with sufficient details regarding space and time.

In this paper, we present some creative writing activities in which three techniques have been used: the comics, the writing marathon, and the lost manuscript. The activities were organised in a rural school, and the participants were some secondary school students. In this study we analysed the organised learning activities and their results. The tasks given, the way of organising the activities, giving positive feedback during the activities, led the students to value the activities as interesting, motivating, challenging, and to continue the writing process outside the school. As a result of applying these three creative writing techniques, the students wrote interesting narrative texts, while their degree of complexity increased by rewriting the texts, this way proving their efficiency. We came to the conclusion that one of these creative writing techniques, well explained by the teacher and correctly applied by the students, stimulated the creative process and gave them the opportunity to be as creative as possible and to create interesting stories in a geographical area described with sufficient details regarding space and time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents pragmatic evidence to make learning a geographical process. It investigates how place-based education (PBE) can deepen the sense of place and vice versa. The study first reviews the meaning of PBE and continues with an ontological discussion of place. As place is theorized, learning practices in the course Sustainable Urban Development and Hong Kong are outlined. The submissions of students are analyzed, and selected reflections are presented to interface with the ontological construct of place. We examine how PBE can enrich student awareness of place and in what way student appreciations of place can add values to the geographical reasoning on sustainability- and urbanism-related topics. Results show that site selection is important and place in PBE is both real and imagined. Heritage conservation and place revitalization are potential reflective topics to design a PBE-based teaching praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this introduction to the Focus Section “Learning as a Geographical Process,” I provide a context for the four articles that follow, by means of (1) making explicit the threefold rationale for this initiative; (2) relating this initiative with previous geographical scholarship on the problematic of learning; (3) highlighting the significance of the self-referential character of our work; (4) providing a brief outline of the articles that follow; and (5) pointing out the important fact that both “learning” and “geographical process” constitute semantically rich categories and that relating the two involves a many-to-many type of logical mapping. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]