School at the IGC

Symposium “School and Geography”

The two-day symposium “School and Geography”, which will be held in German, is geared toward teachers of  geography. The symposium, which revolves around the issue of competence-based teaching and learning, offers four simultaneously scheduled sessions on the following topics:

“Systemic Thinking”, “Methods and Skills”, “Orientation in Space”, and “Communication”. Each session will feature two theoretical talks and two examples from the classroom.  

iGeo

The international Geography Olympiad (iGeo) will be held in Cologne the week before the IGC (21 - 27 August).  More than 30 top Geography students between 16 and 19 years of age will be travelling to Cologne from around the world to compete in the iGeo competition. 
The members making up the German team – Julian Conrad from Bavaria, Max Rogge from Brandenburg, Marlitt Urnauer from Hamburg, and Martin Luddeneit from Thuringia – are the four winners of the “Janus iGeo-Competition Deutschland” held last November in Gießen, in which 318 high school students from ten German states vied for the coveted spots on the iGeo team. The iGeo award ceremony will be held during the IGC Opening Ceremony 26 August 2012, with Sylvia Löhrmann, State Minister for Education, presenting the “Olympic” medals to this year’s winners. 

School programme:  “Geographers at School – School at the IGC”

The IGC 2012 school programme follows a two-track approach. First, school students are integrated into the IGC 2012 as actual participants, with some 400 students from the region having qualified through a special competition to attend the IGC for one day, free of charge. The second programme component takes IGC geographers into the classroom – each of the four participating experts will pay a visit to a local high school in the Cologne-Bonn area, give a talk about their most recent research findings and then discuss them with the students. 
 
Prof. David Lanegran, the renowned urban and economic geographer from Minnesota (USA) will visit the Irmgardis Gymnasium and present a talk on the “Development, urbanization and restructuring of the Iron Mining region of northern Minnesota and the related developments in Detroit”.
 
Prof. Surinder Aggarwal, a geographer from New Delhi (India), megacity expert and IGC keynote speaker on “Urbanisation and Demographic Change”, will discuss the issue of health care in megacities of the global South with students at the Geschwister Scholl Gymnasium in Pulheim.
 
Prof. Yukio Himiyama, geographer from Kyoto (Japan) and one of the vice presidents of the International Geographical Union (IGU) will speak with students from the Kardinal Frings Gymnasiums in Bonn-Beuel about the Fukushima disaster and its consequences from both a geographical and personal point of view. 
 
Prof. Lee Boon-Thong, geographer from Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), looks forward to talking with students from the Willy Brandt Comprehensive School in Cologne-Höhenhaus on "Building buildings or building peoples? Rushing into urban development in Southeast Asia".