Geography in Ghana, Teaching, Policy and Curricular Transformation Through Time

Geography, as a school subject, is expressed in a variety of ways across different national jurisdictions. This article is concerned with analysing the ways in which geography is expressed in Ghanaian curricular standards for secondary schools. The study poses important questions on how the subject of geography has transformed in terms of policy and curricular changes. It is important that the Ghanaian geography curriculum does not operate with an outmoded view of knowledge, which means it needs to change to suit global spatial changes. All of these ideas about knowledge raise important questions on how schools and the school curricula are organised, the most important of which is: what should we teach and at what time should we teach it? It is therefore important that government policymakers do not lose interest in the ‘fine tuning’ of the geographic academic content of subjects taught in schools. This study employed the qualitative approach, which uses both document analysis and interviews to analyse the teaching, policy, and curricular transformation of the discipline of geography in Ghanaian schools through time. Views of geography teachers across the country were sought to fine-tune answers to the research set objectives. The study concludes that the WAEC syllabus is developed basically for the purpose of examination. It is skewed but undergoes changes regularly, mostly every four years. Teachers are therefore in the constant dilemma having to teach all the topics in the GES syllabus, some of which are not examinable but deepen the students’ knowledge in geography and prepare the students for the tertiary level.