Over the last fifteen years, the teaching of geography in French high schools has changed rapidly, partially linked to the evolution affecting geography at university. Approaches based on models representing the organisation of space or on graphic models have been rather popular before sparking off heated debates. The first part explains and highlights the history of the development of such approaches thanks to the concept of « school subject ». The second part gives the provisional conclusions of the research group which has had the task of describing those approaches since 1996; in order to achieve this description, two points of view are chosen in turn, that of didactic transposition and that of school subject.