Abstract
To become a good geography teacher requires developing knowledge, understanding, skills, and attitudes in the field of geography as well as in pedagogical principles. When preparing future teachers, their own conceptual understanding of fundamental geographic concepts must be considered.
Given that, identification of teachers' understanding as well as their misconceptions should be used to adapt the content of the courses. Otherwise, teachers' misconceptions might not be refuted during their training.
Such misconceptions could subsequently be transmitted to pupils after the pre-service teachers start their teaching careers. Therefore, it is crucial to encourage conceptual change in pre-service teachers' thinking to avoid the snowball effect of passing on misunderstandings of important geographic concepts.
This chapter focuses on geography pre-service teachers' misconceptions related to maps. It reports on an example of how to identify misconceptions (using empirical data as evidence) and encourage conceptual change.
This approach was developed by and is used in the geography teacher training program at the Faculty of Science, Charles University, Prague. It is demonstrated in the case of one map-related concept: contours as a form of relief depiction in large-scale maps.