The Future of Education

Landscape is the object of human perceptions: being the result of the interaction of many natural and cultural components, it conditions the evolution of environment and forms the base of spatial-temporal development of a region. Therefore it could become a “medium” to communicate the Territorial Sciences to the whole society.

By integrating different information about the geo-morphological arrangement and the land use of a region, it is possible to reach a complete knowledge of the territory: a multi-scale Landscape approach is even more adopted in the applied research.

The divulgation of scientific heritage, using topics well known and appreciated, may represent one of the new goals for the Territorial Sciences; the GIS are able to synthesize, manage and represent a large amount of data; thanks to GIS it’s almost easy to reach an evaluation of the state of the studied landscapes, referring to the dual risk/resource which characterizes our country. In Italy, one of the projects aimed at conveying a recognition of the territory is the “Map of Nature”, (ISPRA) that analyzes the state of the environment following a holistic and multi-scale approach.

The Lanscape is also the key factor to connect core ideas of geo-enviromental sciences in a sintetic and systemic way. For that reason, from an educational viewpoint, the research focuses on the experimentation of that systemic approach in classroom. It is a perspective and effective combination developing didactic units about the landscape of the local area, adapted to the Italian contest of high school, by using IBSE (Inquiry-based Science Education) instruction. That new approach enables students to use the local territory as a laboratory, consistently with goals such as the knowledge of the place where students live in everyday life, understanding of its evolution in the space and in the time, the adoption of the right strategies for the management of the territory and making of responsible and sustainable decisions. The analysis of “shapes and materials” is carried out through direct observations, analysis of pictures , analysis of topographic and thematic maps and GIS processing.