Space Representation and Gender Differences: A Flipped Approach to Geography Teaching

According to recent literature, men and women do not process spatial information in the same way (Berthoz, 2009). The origin of these differences is not known, but experimental evidences demonstrate a huge variety of strategies the representation of space according to sex, context, purpose to reach, education, age. Our assumption is that the different behaviors between genders is important in studying geography, in particular in use of maps. Using maps, if concurrent with navigation, implies a transformation from the egocentric perspective to the geocentric perspective, which is one of the aspects in which gender-related behaviors mainly differ. This peculiar problem is inscribed, in Italy, in a broader framework that sees an educational emergency linked to the study of geography. This emergency arises from the reduction in the number of hours dedicated to the discipline and the distance between the theoretical dimension of human geography and the need for practical activities that make teaching effective. The Flipped Classroom model provides a complementarity among the logics of problem solving, learning-by-doing, and reflective learning: activity is at the center of didactics, learning is experienced in the first person, matures through the execution of a task and is finally remodeled through a discussion, and a teacher-guided correction. The expert knowledge of the teacher is fully profitable to the extent that he is questioned by the student, involved in solving problems, called to give his point of view in the discussion of a case. This article proposes some teaching activities, based on the flipped classroom, which were designed and developed keeping in mind gender differences, providing a series of equivalent teaching materials that matched the different cognitive strategies