Reflections on Teaching Undergraduate and Postgraduate Geography

Abstract

Written in 1989 (and updated for this publication), this article expresses a moment when the expansion of postgraduate Geography was being debated due to the concentration of these programs in the Southeast and South. The article is above all a reflection on Geography and its position in the environmental debates of the period and which are still relevant today. Environment and nature are discussed from a geographical perspective of spatial totality, articulating physical to social and society to nature. The unity of Geography is emphasized in the study of the environment and applied in Bachelor and Licentiate degrees. Based on this disciplinary identity, postgraduate Geography is engaged in a permanent process of balancing professional training with the incorporation of new social issues and the result has been the multiplication of new courses throughout the country, well beyond the seven postgraduate programs which existed at the time when the article was written.