The purpose of this study is to develop the geography lessons, to clarify the relations between social
phenomenon on the multi-scale based on the concept of geographical scale in which the process of the
scale is valued.
There are three discernible meanings of scale in geographical research: the cartographic,
methodological and what can be called geographical scale(Smith, 2000). Geographical scale means the
dimension of a specific spectacle of city, river basin or earth in these. In a word, it has the semantic
content that suits a specific concrete process where nature and human landscape are formed with
geographical scale rather than the abstraction for the research. Geographical scale reflects a geographic
reality from other scale concepts.
In this study, the author tried to develop the geography lessons to which the social phenomenon that
had been projected to space was able to be considered on the multi-scale based on the concept of
geographical scale. The developed unit is ‘Survey of Home regional area, Haruno town, Kochi city’ for
junior high school students. To consider, home regional area is influenced from various scales and gives
it, the following contents are built into the lesson plans.
a. Why did the vegetable horticulture become active in Haruno town? (Local scale)
b. Why is the promotion of productive area important in the farm policy of Japan? (Influence that
national scale gives local scale)
c. Why was the tomato productive area weeded out in 40 years in the past?(Reorganization of
productive area in national scale)
d. Why did the import of the vegetable come to influence the agriculture of Kochi Prefecture and
Haruno town? (Influence that global scale gives national scale and local scale)
e. After basing these content, the student forecasts the agriculture of Haruno town in the future. And,
the student thinks about the strategy to continue as Haruno town stable, continuous vegetable
productive area. (Forecast in the future and participation)
As mentioned above, the result of this study was to have proposed the lesson plans that were able to
be considered on the multi-scale based on the concept of geographical scale.
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