Necessity for Universities and Colleges to Open Geography and Environment-Related Curriculum

The universities and colleges opening the former curriculum are less than half of those opening the latter curriculum. Besides the reason of shortage of qualified teachers, above 50% of these universities and colleges are skeptical about the nature and knowledge of the curriculum of geography. Up to now the fact that geography still cannot get satisfactory achievements in the contents of knowledge ever since its development in the academic and education fields of Taiwan is mostly attributed to the abandonment of geography course by half of the local universities and colleges.

This study indicates that all the universities and colleges strongly support the necessity and value of geographic and environment-related curricula in the general education curricula. Thus, it is very important to study how to design for these universities and colleges in the future the course framework of the curriculum of geography which the students are glad to take and the teachers are pleased to teach, and how to show the living value of geography.

In fact the name of curriculum, no matter environment or geography, is not important at all; what’s more important are the content arrangement and the attractive teaching methods of the curriculum. First of all, these courses have to won public praise for attracting more students to take them, and then the position of the course can thus be solidified. In the changing development of geography, its transformation partly reflects the new global style formed by globalization and glocalization.

What makes people excited is that as found in the survey, such issues or curricula as man-location relationship, man-environment relationship, nature-culture integration, global changes and sustainable development, etc. were frequently ticked and opted by most of these universities and colleges. It implies that the contemporary development trend of geography is tightly linked to the pulses of current social development.

These universities and colleges have opened 42 courses for the curriculum of geography and 40 courses for the environment-related curriculum. Based on the results of the questionnaire survey and the counseling meetings, this paper constructs the framework for 6 geographic and 6 environment-related general education courses, totaling 12 credits. Depending on their natures and individual needs, each university or college can open 1~3 selected courses, totaling 2~6 credits, so as to educate the modern world citizens with the accomplishments of both geography and environment.