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Education Dive
There's more to geography than just 50 states and their capitals
Educators and social studies experts are committing to keep geography from vanishing from curriculum.
Kathryn Baron
June 24, 2020
When Kelly León heard rumblings her district, the Sweetwater Union High
School District in Southern California, was thinking about ditching 9th
grade geography several years ago, she felt she had a "professional
obligation" to challenge the proposal and "fight for a well-rounded
education" for her students.
León, named 2019 Teacher of the Year by the California Council for the
Social Studies, pulled together a group of educators who worked with
the California Geographic Alliance, based nearby at San Diego State
University, to redesign the curriculum.
They proposed transforming it from the traditional course in which
students studied physical geography, history and culture as discrete
units for each region of the world, into an inquiry-based,
community-focused course where students would actually leave the
classroom to examine the links between people and their environment.
The school board gave it the go-ahead.
Last year, two students studying the impact of pollution in the San
Diego Bay and its beaches, met with the mayor and other officials and
proposed ideas for how students could help to fix the problem. The
course also explores how geography impacts people around the globe.
After a visitor from Uganda described how people in his village walked
miles for clean water, the students tried carrying bottled water and
learned just how heavy it can be.
“For them to have to carry five gallons — we could barely manage two.
It was really shocking to us,” one student told researchers at SDSU.
The course is a hit with students and teachers, but the 40,000-student
district’s experience with geography is an anomaly. In much of the
country, K-12 geography is the neglected stepchild.
More than labeling countries on a blank map
As of 2019, just 20 states require some geography for high school
graduation, according to the Education Commission of the States, but
most of them give districts wide latitude to decide what to cover and
how to teach it. For example, North Dakota and Oklahoma say only that
geography “may” be included in social studies requirements, while in
Texas, Virginia and New Hampshire, students can meet the requirement
with either geography or world history.
Often geography is folded into one of the other disciplines making up
social studies — civics/government, history or economics. Only six
states require students to take a standalone geography class to
graduate.
A key challenge, said León, is “the public doesn’t understand geography
and that trickles down to our policymakers and the people who are
ultimately put in charge of making these decisions.”
Geography often evokes middle school memories of identifying countries
on a blank map, naming the longest river in Asia or memorizing the 50
state capitals — the sort of game-show knowledge that takes a minute to
find online.
But geography is really “the study of places and the relationships
between people and their environments,” explains National Geographic.
“Geography seeks to understand where things are found, why they
are there and how they develop and change over time.” Gilbert
Grosvenor, former chairman and president of the National Geographic
Society, said geography “allows us to analyze the past and anticipate
the future.”
'A historic time with unprecedented challenges'
In recent years, understanding the future has become part of dissecting the present.
“Understanding geography has never been more important,” Vicki
Phillips, chief education officer at the National Geographic Society,
wrote in an email. Faced with the interconnected challenges of the
COVID-19 pandemic, population growth and the effects of climate change,
she said, “it’s critical that students understand not just where these
issues are playing out but also why they’re happening, and the impacts
they’re having.”
Technology has expanded geography’s ability to address these
challenges. Researchers and scientists use geographic information
systems — or GIS — to analyze, explain and seek solutions to these
crises, as well as for making everyday decisions, such as configuring
transit routes, deciding where to build schools and parks, addressing
homelessness and even locating missing cell phones.
Geography education in the U.S., however, has been atrophying for years
in public schools, often subsumed into other social studies courses and
taught by teachers who may never have taken a standalone geography
class in college. Students’ scores on geography as part of the National
Assessment of Educational Progress reflect that the subject is not a
priority in many schools.
On the 2018 geography results earlier this year, only 25% of
8th-graders reached the proficient level, while 29% scored below basic
— worse than the previous test in 2014. Performance levels have been
generally stagnant since the first geography assessment in 1994, when
nearly a third of students in grades 4, 8 and 12 scored below basic and
just over one in four students were proficient or higher.
What gets tested gets taught
Last year, geography education also received another blow from an
unexpected source. The National Assessment Governing Board, which sets
policy for NAEP exams, prefaced its 2018 geography framework — as well
as all previous versions — as “guided by the conviction that a broad
knowledge of geography is an essential part of a full education."
"This is particularly true at a time when the lives of nearly all our
citizens are deeply affected by what happens throughout the world," it
warned.
It came as a surprise then, when NAGB announced last year it had
eliminated geography (along with fine arts and economics and expansions
in foreign language) from the testing schedule for the time being.
“We were completely blindsided,” said Tina Heafner, president of the
National Council for the Social Studies. “We had no idea that they were
changing the assessment schedule.”
Lesley Muldoon, executive director of NAGB, said budget constraints
forced the board to remove and scale back assessments in some subjects
to focus more resources on reading and mathematics, the only two
subjects Congress specifically mandated for NAEP testing. Muldoon tried
to allay anticipated concerns about the message NAGB’s decision might
send to state education departments.
"The value of a particular subject should not and does not depend on whether NAEP measures it," she said in a written statement.
Not all geographers share that confidence. They fear by eliminating it
from NAEP testing, states and districts will have even less incentive
to include geography in an already overcrowded curriculum.
Thomas Herman, a geography professor at SDSU and executive director of
the California Geographic Alliance, warned the decision “is essentially
pulling out one of the last footholds on this slippery slope whereby
geography might simply lose traction and lose its spot in the
curriculum.”
Reversing geography’s vanishing act
There are still, however, pockets of growing interest in the subject.
The Advanced Placement Human Geography course is one example. The
number of high school students completing the exam surged from 3,272
when it was first offered in 2001 to 233,817 in 2019, making it one of
the fastest growing AP subjects.
In Salem City Schools, a K-12 district in Virginia, every student takes
geography in 8th grade and must pass an end-of-course exam to be
eligible for an advanced diploma. However, while the content is the
same, instruction varies between teachers.
Judith Painter, who just completed her 28th year teaching, says she has
taught every social studies subject, but geography is her “first love.”
Painter was only required to take two geography courses to earn her
credential and is quick to acknowledge “it certainly doesn’t prepare
you to teach geography.”
Painter has made up for that, however, by taking advantage of
professional development opportunities, particularly through the
National Geographic Society, which selected her as a Grosvenor Teacher
Fellow two years ago.
She spent 16 days on an expedition to Antarctica, exploring and
learning new ways to engage her students through field-based
experiences. Afterward, Painter wrote and received a grant for a
program she called Beyond the Walls to take students hiking, canoeing,
fishing and exploring the world around them in other ways.
In one project, students surveyed their neighborhood green spaces,
created a heat map showing how many there are and where they are
located, and then analyzed the data to decide whether they should ask
the city council to designate more open space areas.
Painter is a fan of various websites that provide free resources for
teachers, including the National Geographic Society’s Educator Network,
and she is a frequent contributor to iNaturalist, where she and other
teachers share ideas, curriculum and descriptions of their class field
work.
A 2015 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office cited a
lack of teacher preparation and PD, poor quality instructional
materials and insufficient use of geographic technology in classrooms
as key challenges to improving K-12 geography education.
“The sad reality is that geography is not a requirement in most
preservice curricula,” said Charles Regan, executive director of the
National Council for Geographic Education.
He notes a few places are taking the lead in strengthening preservice
requirements. One exception is the University of South Carolina, which
now requires geography in its teacher education program. But the
campaign to enact change took 10 years, and Regan is concerned
geography cannot wait that long.
Instead, the NCGE has shifted its priorities to PD and is preparing to
launch an online resource library with teacher-developed and
classroom-tested lesson plans. Unless geography instruction is
improved, said Regan, “the perception will carry on of ‘What are the 50
states and their capitals; what’s the longest river in Asia?’ And
that’s the beginning and end of geography in many peoples’ minds.”
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