In this presentation there is a try to link experiences from field work in India and Sweden to education, primarily at upper school levels as well as the university level. Experiences are primarily taken from research done in rural areas in India and in Sweden by an international research team, but also from Swedish student’s work in Banaras, an urban area in India. The approach is comparative and didactic in the sense that it is focused around cultural comparison and the didactic questions what, why and how.

The didactic question “why” is in focus and means that cultural communication and understanding bring knowledge in geography into an important didactic perspective. To look at both similarities and differences gives interesting results: that different cultures perhaps have more in common than what differs between them. This is important for bringing people all over the world together and to promote peace and international aid. To communicate different cultural expressions gives also possibilities to evaluate your own culture in the light of other cultures. The question “what” can be answered or discussed by the help of some examples from field work done by the research team and from different areas like marriage, child work and corruption. The question of development laws and different paradigms/discourses are also discussed in a new perspective, where different sectors of the society are evaluated.

The didactic question “how” could be linked to the examples above and other issues. Here it would be possible to develop educational methods based on comparative aspects between different schools (international network) and their geographical surroundings using for example interactive media and Google Earth.  This could help getting a better understanding of social development all over the world.