Every year, as a high school geography teacher at Haut-Lac International Bilingual School™, I am asked the same question: how would you define geography for students about to start an IB programme?
And every year, my answer is more or less the same:
Geography is connection.
It is about seeing the invisible lines between things. Nothing exists in isolation; everything influences something else. It is also about accepting that we live in a world of greys, where easy answers rarely exist.
Geography asks us to look beyond the obvious and resist putting things into neat boxes: environment here, economy there, society somewhere else. It challenges us to understand how these elements interact and constantly reshape the systems we live in.
Not easy to fit all of that on one slide.
What is geography? The answer I found at the Villars Institute
Two weeks ago, I spent a day with a group of educators at the Villars Institute, exploring how systems thinking can be brought into education and the curriculum, and why some of the world’s largest employers now see it as one of the most valuable future skills.
That day, I found a new definition for my subject:
Geography is systems thinking.
How we teach systems thinking in IB geography
At Haut-Lac™, this is already at the heart of how we teach Geography in the International Baccalaureate MYP and DP programmes. We teach students to approach problems (or challenges, as we prefer to call them) as systems. You cannot touch one part of a system without affecting the rest. There are no perfect solutions, no magic answers, and rarely a solution where everyone wins.
Think about globalisation, climate change, resource consumption, urbanisation, migration, inequality. They might look like separate topics. They are not. They are different expressions of interconnected systems. So instead of asking:
“What is the solution?”
we ask:
“How does this system work, and how can we influence it?”
We categorise. We label. We divide. But real life crosses these boundaries all the time. The challenge is not to find the one perfect solution, but to understand the system well enough to know where to intervene. Sometimes that means working at different scales. Sometimes it means strengthening the feedback loops that help and weakening the ones that harm. Sometimes it means accepting that there will be winners and losers, and that the best option is simply the one that does more good than harm.
That is a much harder way of thinking. It is also much closer to reality.
What our high school students are investigating in IB geography
Recently, my students have been exploring questions such as:
- What should be done about Coca-Cola’s water consumption in India?
- How can we address the conflicts created by counter-urbanisation in small rural villages?
- What can be done to support climate refugees?
And they keep reaching the same conclusion: it is a system. The more they investigate, the more complicated the picture becomes. That is exactly the point.
Why the world is more complicated than a Swiss watch
As we said during the day in Villars, it is more complicated than a Swiss watch.
Systems thinking can be uncomfortable. It takes away the certainty we sometimes want to give our students: no simple answer, no single cause, no perfect solution. The world is messy. But perhaps that is exactly what education should prepare them for.
A Swiss watch may be incredibly complex, but its parts were designed to work together predictably. The systems our students will inherit are open. They involve people, ecosystems, economies, cultures, technologies and institutions. They evolve, they adapt, and sometimes they behave in ways nobody anticipated.
Preparing students for a world with no perfect answers
Our job is not to hand students a box of answers. It is to give them the future skills to understand complexity, and to recognise that when we intervene in one part of a system, the whole system may respond.
So perhaps my answer to “What is Geography?” has finally become simpler:
Geography is systems thinking. And that fits on one slide.
Inmaculada De Pablos Tegedo
IBMYP & IBDP Geography Teacher
Haut-Lac International Bilingual School™
