EXPLORING NEW BORDERLANDS: TRANSCULTURAL LEARNING IN GERMAN GEOGRAPHY TEXTBOOKS – INTRODUCING A NEW APPROACH TO TEACHING THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE US-MEXICAN BORDER

While intercultural learning has gradually forced its way into German geography lessons, truly transnational and transcultural approaches that go beyond the very idea of the national paradigm are still widely ignored in German school geography. In an increasingly globalised world with both goods and people constantly on the move, national boundaries have, however, evolved into new hybrid transcultural contact zones of great heterogeneity. Correspondingly geography teachers, curriculum developers and textbook authors are now faced with the challenge of opening up school geography not only to previously neglected transnational/transcultural agendas but to indeed start teaching the spatial categories out of which the very ideas have originated. Within this understanding of transculturality, the US-Mexican border serves as a cutting edge example as one of the world’s most distinctive borderlands in the contact zone between the so-called “first” and “third” world. It is therefore the example of this hybrid in-between space that this article is going to ask how and to what extent transcultural approaches can be successfully implemented in German secondary geography teaching. By means of a comparative analysis of German geography curricula and textbooks, I would like to not only point out both opportunities seized and missed, but ultimately try to provide for an outlook of how both transcultural ideas and localities can be fruitfully used for a contemporary classroom that dedicates itself to global education and the teaching of global issues.