The linchpins of geographic reasoning for a successful teaching/learning: Comparison between school curricula in Italy and Brazil

A considerable portionof the most recent researcherin the field of geography learning has been dedicated to the investigation of the modus operandiemployedin the interpretationof the spatiality of facts and phenomena. Therefore, mental operations essential to the exercise ofan effective geographic reasoning are, nowadays, the object of systematic investigations. It is in response to this contemporary realitythat it isregistered in several countries that initiatives aimed to the recent reformulation of their curricular norms guiding the teaching of geography and, consequently, their educational systems. With the purpose of identify and understandthe geography prescribedin theofficial documents that rule the education in Brazil and in Italy, this study shows the results ofa comparative reading among these national documents. In our comparative analysis, to which we associated to the Grounded Theory, we took as reference andfoundation the substantive concepts that we considered essential to the geographic analysis (space –scale –time) and to the development of an effective geographic reasoning. The results of this analysis reveal a set of significant and diversifiedconditions and, also, to a certain extent, divergent as the geography that is intended to be taught in bothcountries