Landscape as a Nature Laboratory in Geography Learning in South Malang, Indonesia

Abstract

The Southern Mountains Zone in East Java is generally a block that is lifted and tilted to the south. Southern Malang is taken place in the Southern Mountains Zone in East Java. It has a landscape appearance that can be used as nature laboratory in landscape-based geography learning and teaching activities. The goals of this study are to reveal the existence of South Malang landscape and the relation to geography learning in class. The method used to achieve the goals is identifying South Malang landscape through fieldwork survey, analysing the previous research results, making landscapes profile, as well as analysing the relation between the landscapes and learning geography aspects in class. The result of the study shows that the research area has karst, fluvial and coastal landscapes. The karst landscape has several surface and subsurface formation such as closed basins, ponor, doline/sinkhole, karst hills, and valley. Meanwhile, the subsurface are in the forms of caves, subterranean rivers, and cave ornaments. Learning geography in relation to karst can be included in the field of karst geomorphology. The coastal landscapes is in far south part, in the form of beaches/gravel and sandy area, sea waves, tides and ebbs, and coastal geomorphology learning context. The fluvial coastal landscape is related to the watershed in Sumbermanjing Wetan district. The studies that can be included are in the scope of hydrology and fluvial geomorphology. Other aspects that can be used as the object of study in learning and teaching geography are related to geography environment, Geographic Information Systems, disasters affair, geography natural resources, soil and water conservation, geography tourism, and geology. Student activities in the implementation of fieldwork can be done by applying equipment in field data collection to find or test hypotheses in fieldwork learning.