Fieldwork in the Madrid Geographical Circle: Roots and Development

********** I am a trained historian. Even today I confess to a fascination with deciphering and interpreting the past. I revel in the solitude and reflection of the archive and the library, and I am passionate about the facts revealed to us by writings from a former age. Fortunately, the practice of geography not only has provided me with those satisfactions but also has allowed me to give them new meaning, to adjust my outlook. And it has added a fresh dimension to learning, with the discovery and the satisfaction of the geographical trip and fieldwork. My experience was a modest part of a much wider development of the field excursion as a formal institution by the Madrid Circle of the Spanish Geographical School. The school was organized at the end of the 1960s around the work of the master geographer Manuel de Teran by the second generation of his disciples, of whom the most important were Eduardo Martinez de Pison and Jose Antonio de Zulueta. Those were the closing years of the Franco dictatorship (he died in December 1975), conterminous with the first economic boom in Spain yet still bracketed within the political structures and restraints of the system. Protest was gaining momentum in universities, there were the beginnings of a certain freedom, and the scientific isolation of decades was finally being breached. Fields of knowledge and new curricula emerged. Among them, beginning in 1968, was the second cycle of geography, a branching from the massive shared trunk of geography and history in the humanities faculties. The General Education Law of 1970 pa ved the way for an impressive growth in the number of Spanish universities and students. University geography studies were formalized in 1990, and now more than twenty-five Spanish public universities art offer undergraduate or advanced degrees in geography. THE INSTITUTION LIBRE DE ENSENANZA AND GEOGRAPHICAL FIELD TRIPS Manuel de Teran (1904-1984) was of the Spanish liberal and anti-Franco tradition. He was personally linked with the Institution Libre de Ensenanza (ILE), a profound movement for regeneration in education at the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth centuries, which rose in rebellion against the emptiness of official education and whose influence can still be seen in the most striking of today's Spanish educational initiatives. Before the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), Teran was a teacher at the Instituto-Escuela, an educational initiative linked to the ILE but abolished like so many other things after Franco's victory. Many of us--Nicolas Ortega, Eduardo Martinez de Pison, Angel Cabo, and I--have written about the educational value of the ILE. I should note, here, that the "educational naturalism" of the ILE, something specifically endorsed by its founder, Francisco Giner de los Rios, included the excursion or field trip as an element central to the educational process. And it was this conviction t hat, many years later, Teran was able to transfer to the teaching of geography. The radical reform of educational methods proposed by the ILE sought to replace the sterile teaching of geography from books with lessons on concrete things and field trips, moving geography to the open air. "For the teaching of Geography to be about things, not words and terms repeated without understanding them, the student must be able to see the types and forms these terms refer to, the teacher must explain in situ," said Rafael Torres Campos in a presentation to the Madrid Geographical Society (1882, 5). (1) But this philosophy went far beyond simply "teaching in the open air"; it defended teaching about things and education in all areas of life. As Manuel B. Cossia, Giner de los Rios's leading disciple, put it: School outings, an essential element in the intuitive process, have been one of the characteristics of the ILE since its inception. What the student learns in terms of concrete knowledge is very little, if we compare it with the vast spiritual horizon that opens up as we contemplate people and places. …