Photography and geography teaching: a pedagogical strategy for mobilizing geographical reasoning

Abstract

Geography teaching in basic education has been challenged to move beyond predominantly descriptive and content-centered approaches, assuming the development of geographical reasoning as its formative axis. This shift implies encouraging students to critically interpret space, understand power relations, mobilize analytical categories such as territory, scale and landscape, and articulate different languages in reading the world. In this context, this article discusses the use of photography as a didactic resource for the construction of geographical reasoning in the study of the Cold War with 11th-grade high school students. Grounded in theoretical frameworks from geographic education, visual language, and critical pedagogy, the study adopts a qualitative approach, taking the form of a reflective pedagogical experience report. The proposal involved students’ selection of photographs, the organization of a school exhibition, and oral presentations mediated by previously established analytical criteria. The analysis of the processes showed that working with images favored a multiscale reading of the conflict, an understanding of the materialization of power in the territory, and the development of a critical stance toward visual representations. The reflections arising from the experience indicate that photography, when treated as a situated language and source, constitutes a powerful tool for mobilizing geographical reasoning, provided it is articulated with problematizing teacher mediation and students’ verbalization.