Geography Integration

In May 2006, an NBC News article, titled "Young Americans shaky on geographic smarts," found in polling 510 young Americans that:

1. While Israeli-Palestinian strife has been in the news for the entire lives of the respondents, 75 percent were unable to locate Israel on a map of the Middle East.
2. One-third of respondents couldn't pinpoint Louisiana on a map and 48 percent were unable to locate Mississippi.
3. While the outsourcing of jobs to India has been a major U.S. business story, 47 percent could not find the Indian subcontinent on a map of Asia.

How knowledgeable are you of world geography? Take the quiz! 


As discussed in my current events blog, effectively teaching social studies requires that educators integrate the many disciplines within social studies into their units. One such discipline, which I integrated into my current events lesson by using nonfiction articles around the world and having students employ Google Earth in their presentations, is geography and based on the NBC poll discussed above, it might be in need of increased and more effective focus in our schools. In the NBC article (2006), National Geographic president John Fahey said: "Geographic illiteracy impacts our economic well-being, our relationships with other nations and the environment, and isolates us from the world." The National Council for the Social Studies seems to agree with Fahey's assertion of the critical importance of geographic knowledge given its own standards for student achievement. While I contend that all of the themes can and should integrate geography, because geography sheds light on all of the themes- production, governance, identity, culture, the emphasis on geography is most clearly visible in NCSS Theme #3  "People, Places, and Environments." Specifically, NCSS states that students will study geography to: "acquire a useful basis of knowledge for informed decision-making on [social, cultural, economic, and civic] issues arising from human-environmental relationships."

To truly study geography and develop the well-rounded knowledge base desired by NCSS, students must ask and answers questions relating to the five themes of geography.   

              
                                                                                      

Students explore the relationship between humanity and the environment. For instance, humans depend upon the natural world for survival (food, shelter) and adapt to meet additional needs (develop technology). 


Students determine the absolute location of a place by determining its exact location using longitude and latitude coordinates. Students approximate relative location by comparing locations to one another. Example: Chile's relative location is between Argentina and the Pacific. 

Students explore a place by finding out what happens there both physically and with humans. Places can be characterized by their topography, vegetation, climate, population density, government, religion, language, etc. 

Students can classify places into regions that share characteristics and determine within which regions an area belongs. Similarly, students can compare and contrast different regions.  

Students learn the extent to which the world is interconnected. The movement of people, goods, and ideas cause global relationships; particular issues can have international effects.







In order to engage students in geography, an online collaboration of geography educators has designed "103 creatively simple ways to teach geography." Of these 103 ways, I have selected ten that I would like to utilize in my future classroom. 

10. Having students create wordles featuring certain places after having researched them allows students to summarize their findings about the human and physical characteristics of a place and draw conclusions. Perhaps all of the description words in the wordle can help a group to classify the place within a certain region. Another activity is that students could create wordles without the name of the place. Then, other students could have to investigate the words in the wordle to uncover the place in question. 

9. I can remember creating travel brochures of foreign places in my elementary years to gather and present information on a place unfamiliar to classmates. Now, e-cards represent a more technologically advanced project to meet the same objective. Students would need to research all of a place's highlights, thus incorporating the themes of place, interaction, and region, as well as provide its absolute and relative location to encourage others to travel there. 

8. Images are powerful tools to have students make connections with a place. As I learned in teaching my causes of the American Revolution unit, in which students were eager to share their thoughts on pictures in the introduction, students are adept at recognizing details in a image and making inferences from them. Asking students to analyze pictures or make predictions of what will come next from a picture incorporates higher-order thinking skills. 

7. Additionally, integrating English Language Arts, pictures can also be utilized to have students work on pinpointing the 5Ws or improve visualization of a text. To practice visualization, students can sit back-to-back with one student viewing the picture and another student not viewing the picture. The student with picture in view is then challenged with the task of describing the picture in such vivid detail that the other student can draw the picture without looking at it. This is a test of both visualization, to understand how sensory language improves literature, but also of clear communication between peers. 

6. Understanding the benefits of imagery, a befuddlr activity, in which an image is scrambled, would allow students to further engage in observing details of an image. For example, students may need to look at the background landscape noticing vegetation, animals, or topography. I planned an activity similar to this in my causes of the American Revolution direct instruction lesson for guided practice, when students had to predict an image slowly uncovered by Google Presentation animation. 

5.  A cooperative learning project in which students could actively participate to bolster their knowledge of a place is creating a landscape box. There are limitless ways that students can try to recreate a place: people in correct clothing, proper animals and vegetation, architecture, technology, etc. In order to fully recreate the place, students have to know all of its characteristics. To gain this knowledge students could explore using Google Earth and... 

4. other immersive panorama technology. 360 panoramas go beyond the value of even photographs as students feel that they are really in the place, and can "look around," in essence constituting a virtual field trip. Additionally, technology such as Google Earth allows students to see the absolute and relative locations of countries on the globe. Once "zoomed in" to the country, characteristics easily abound to show students what daily life looks like in that place. Also to achieve this, I think videos could be immensely valuable. 

3. One important characteristic of places is topography, the physical features of an area. Three-dimensional excel models allow students to understand how land formations influence a place and can determine how regions are separated. While mapmaker, which allows users to add different layers to a map from political boundaries to animal migrations to CO2 admissions, does not yet appear to have a topography layer option, it would be interesting for students to compare topographical maps to political boundaries to form the generalization that geography can delineate feasible borders between countries. Furthermore, creating these models successfully integrates mathematics and science, on top of technology, to meet the powerful teaching and learning principle of integration.  

2. Building on the value of images and three-dimensional panorama technology, a webcam would allow students to view an area "live." At different times during the day over the course of months, students could "check-in" with the webcam feed and record any changes as a means of collecting data for an inquiry-based activity. In fact, different groups could each have their own webcam feed of a different area, analyze the recorded information, and draw conclusions about the physical and human characteristics of the place. 

1. My favorite way to integrate geography is by posing social studies questions for students to explore, as this most meaningfully speaks to the purpose of social studies and importance of geography as a discipline.  

If the goal of social studies it to develop students' abilities to make "informed and reasoned decisions," then students must practice applying all of the knowledge they gain about geography to situations (NCSS, 1994, p. 3). Practicing reasoning with complex information and highlighting the connections between different powers at play, will prepare students to be thoughtful global citizens. However, beyond just providing scenarios, teachers can incorporate current events or evaluate events in history by posing inquiry-based questions for students to explore. For example: Why throughout history has France easily been taken over by invading armies while Great Britain has not? Students can then respond to the question by considering the physical characteristics of both places as well as the location. Where is acid rain most prevalent in the United States and why? Students then have to collect data on accumulation of acid rain in different regions of the country, determine how acid rain is produced, locate where the highest concentration of factories are in the United States, and study maps of wind patterns. 

Overall, geography is a discipline in which students must be able to collect knowledge and then apply it to the larger issues that are happening in the world. One cannot understand the Israeli-Palestinian crisis in the Middle East, the reason Napoleon failed in Russia, or the causes behind the breakup of Yugoslavia without knowledge of geography and its themes. Thus, application of geographical knowledge is a critical skill students must form in order to become the global citizens that the world needs. 

References

Associated Press. (2006, May 2). Young Americans shaky on geographic smarts. NBC News. Retrieved on April 12, 2015, from: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/12591413/ns/us_news-education/t/young-americans-shaky-geographic-smarts/#.VSx1SvnF__E

Google. (2012, March 30). What can you do with geography? Retrieved April 14, 2015, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mj8MTWZX4M

National Council for the Social Studies. (1994). “What Is Social Studies?” Expectations of Excellence: Curriculum Standards for Social Studies.

National Council for the Social Studies. (n.d.). National curriculum standards for social studies. Retrieved April 3, 2015, from http://www.socialstudies.org/standards/strands