Challenges of Teaching Advanced Placement Human Geography

Abstract

The new Advanced Placement (AP) human geography course is a wonderful opportunity to ensure the availability of high quality geographic education for high school students. As with any course, in addition to the students' interest and ability, their success is also closely linked to the teachers' preparation. In order to be as well prepared as possible, most AP human geography teachers want and need to know several things in addition to the course content. Questions addressed include how to promote the course, who to promote it to, necessary geographic background for both students and teachers, recommended texts and other resources, how to prepare students for the examination, and how to incorporate the course into the school curriculum.     

Modern Agriculture in Advanced Placement Human Geography

Abstract

This article is an overview of the agriculture section in the outline of the Advanced Placement (AP) human geography course. It is intended to provide a more detailed framework on which teachers may develop their own curriculum for the AP class. Special emphasis is given to the practice of agriculture in contemporary industrial societies. It also encourages teachers to balance the cultural and historical views of agriculture contained in many textbooks with an economic and geographic focus. Agribusiness is also given special treatment.     

James M. Goodman 1929—2004: Professor Emeritus of Geography University of Oklahoma

Abstract

Effective use of time has become even more critical in today's classrooms. Creating geographically literate students by the year 2000 presents some dilemmas for teachers who are faced with expanding curricula. Developing an efficient, meaningful means of teaching geographical features to help curb geographical illiteracy is a possibility. A group of college instructors and more than 75 preservice elementary teachers experimented with an idea that effectively integrated geography, vocabulary development, writing across the curriculum, and the visual arts. Their successful and time-saving idea can be incorporated into any upper elementary to high school classroom committed to teaching children about geographical features.     

The Future of Radical Geography∗

Radical geography has posed new, and refashioned many old, geographical problems. These problems require attention irrespective of one's political leanings. Yet radical geography has been consistently ignored by mainstream geographers since its inception. This essay examines the reasons for this situation, and finds four answers in Peet's recent review of the history of radical geography [1]. It seems likely that radical geography will continue to receive a cold shoulder unless its future exponents take pains to counter this trend. Six conditions are required to ensure progress, including effective communication in established journals, methodological heterodoxy, and a systematic, discipline-wide evaluation of the contribution of radical geography.     

Chile

Abstract

This study provides empirical information about the extent of geography instruction present in history classrooms. Techniques of protocol analysis were applied to oral references to geography made by teachers and students in 44 U. S. and European history lessons in several grades. The references were coded according to GENIP' s five themes plus a sixth coding category for explicit references to maps. Two types of references were found: passing references, which merely mentioned a geographic issue or feature, and substantive references, in which geography was taught or played a substantial role. That 550 geographic references occur in these lessons may explain why so many history teachers believe that they are adequately integrating geography and history. However, 75 percent of all the references were passing and not substantive. We conclude that the core epistemological events for learning and reasoning in, about, and with geography are not being taught adequately in history lessons.     

Overcoming Geographic Innocence in Geography Education

Abstract

This article deals with the issue of providing geographic training to prospective teachers from the perspective of a secondary school teacher who also teaches a social studies methods course. Research in educational journals provided a background for describing the lack of geographic training among social studies teachers. While the National Geographic Society's alliance network is addressing this issue among practicing teachers, there is still a need to include some geography training for preservice teachers. Suggestions are offered for including geography within the context of the social studies methods course. A plea is also made for geography professors to include the new National Geography Standards in their courses, especially in introductory courses.     

Aadel Brun Tschudi Annual Lecture 2017 – efficiency and equity in development geography,the SDGs and the Sendai Framework

ABSTRACT

What can contemporary geographical research learn from Aadel Brun Tschudi? As a pioneer of development geography, Tschudi emphasised efficiency, equity and the responsibility of geographers to be active in society. While her contributions to development geography were made in the context of nation-building efforts in the mid–late 20th century, the globalising process of the early 21st century raise similar concerns for identity, emergent hierarchies of power and socio-environmental transformation. Using Tschudi’s cardinal principles of equity and efficiency, the paper identifies four action arenas and exemplifies these through interventions aimed at reducing risk and addressing unmet development challenges: (1) high efficiency, low equity (private sector led), (2) low efficiency, low equity (humanitarian sector led), (3) low efficiency, high equity (spontaneous local action), and (4) high efficiency, high equity (collaborative action). The analysis draws out the different ways in which the aspirations and policy communities that own the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 are interacting now and how far these interactions are able to deliver efficiency and equity for the poor in low- and middle-income countries, which is Tschudi’s primary concern.     

Childhood asthma: Regional and social inequalities in parents' perceptions of the diagnostic process in Norway

This paper focuses on the 'cultural turn' which has taken place in British and to a lesser extent North American and Australian human geography in the last decade. It begins by exploring what constitutes the cultural in what has been dubbed 'new cultural geography'. It then explores contemporary claims that cultural geography has eclipsed or marginalised social geography. The final section evaluates these claims about the demise of the social, arguing that the social has not been evacuated but rather has been redefined. While this paper tells a specific story about a particular tradition and geographical frame of reference, it nonetheless has wider relevance because it provides an example of the differential development of particular sub-disciplinary areas, of the way subdisciplinary knowledges shape each other, and of the way understandings of disciplinary trends are contested.     

BIOGEOGRAPHY AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE

In the February 1977 issue of THE PROFESSIONAL GEOGRAPHER Leonard Guelke proposed a new approach to regional geography. This article questions the logic of Guelke's “idealist alternative'’and its applicability to geographical problems.     

Economy,culture and environment: perspectives on the Australian food industry

Intersections between economy, culture and environment pose exciting future challenges for human geography. Part of Griffith Taylor's pioneering role as a geographer was to investigate relationships between these three aspects of human life, although his agenda was that of environmental determinism. This paper considers these intersections as they relate to contemporary geographical studies of restructuring, in particular the emergence of a genuinely global economic system since about 1980. Recent developments in cultural geography argue that geographical analysis of restructuring has been dominated by an economic determinism which has buried other stories which could be told about industrial change. The paper sketches lines of possible dialogue between economic geography and cultural studies, illustrating the argument with examples from restructuring in the Australian food industry. In opening such a dialogue, economic geography would be better placed to return to interactions between economy, culture and environment. In his day, Taylor was not afraid to upset the conventional wisdom about these relationships and this may be one of his most enduring legacies.     

AIDS to Successful Photography

Abstract

The National Geographic Society's Geography Education Program continues to work on improving geography in the nation's schools. A successful network of geography education Alliances is in place across the United States. These state-based Alliances emphasize grass-roots involvement by teachers and other geography educators. Features of the Geography Education Program include inservice teacher training at Alliance-sponsored summer institutes, institutes held at the Society's headquarters in Washington, and specialized institutes devoted to a specific topic such as technology in education, or water issues. In the near future, the Society's projects include urban outreach, technology training and application, development of preservice programs, and the implementation and dissemination of world-class standards in geography.     

The Use of Supplementary Beading

Abstract

Political geography has long been a major field of interest for geography teachers and students. One of the most interesting areas of political geography is the study of boundaries and boundary zones. In this context, the demilitarized zone (DMZ) as a political separating agent has been one of the most controversial issues in the twentieth century. The demilitarized zone of Vietnam, Korea, and Israel all constitute major zones of tension and friction. The major reason for the instability attending these frictions is that the DMZ's were created by military armistice agreements rather than more conventional political processes. Thus the DMZ's are the product of an unresolved conflict. This geopolitical analysis of the Israel-Syrian DMZ describes how the zone was created and how it functioned between 1949 and 1967.     

Geography Education Across the Atlantic at the Geographical Association

Abstract

The Geographical Association (GA) is an international association of over 10,000 geography educators headquartered in Sheffield, England. The National Council for Geographic Education (NCGE) and the GA have similar goals. The GA's annual conferences provide an excellent opportunity to begin geography education partnerships between the NCGE and the GA. Operating exhibits and teaching workshops on geographic information systems at the last three Geographical Association conferences at universities in England afforded the opportunity to network with teachers and pave the way for future collaboration.     

Preservice Geography Education

Abstract

Improving preservice education, especially geography preservice education, is difficult because few geography faculty understand the teacher education process, many education professors who prepare geography teachers are not geographically well-educated, education and geography faculties do not communicate effectively, and efforts by alliances and other organizations have focused on inservice teachers, for the most part. Recommendations to improve preservice education in geography are offered. The authors argue that none of these recommendations should be implemented without considering its relationship with all of the components of the geography education system.     

“GEOGRAPHY IS TWINNED WITH DIVINITY”: THE LAUDIAN GEOGRAPHY OF PETER HEYLYN

ABSTRACT. This critical history of geography looks to the political concepts that historical actors held and analyzes the incorporation of these concepts into geography. Peter Heylyn, who politicized his geographical books Microcosmus (1621) and, still more, Cosmographie (1657), followed William Laud's characteristic brand of High Church Anglicanism, avowedly hostile both to Roman Catholicism and to Calvinist forms of Protestantism, while upholding an ideal of the Church of England as both independent and apostolic. Further, Laudians were stalwart defendants of monarchy as a divine institution. This Laudian vision of church and state informed Heylyn's geographical works, which goes against a received wisdom that they are divorced from his polemical historical, political, and theological tracts. We thus recover the politics of early modern geography as contemporaries might have understood them.     

Upland Adjustment to Regional Drainage in Central Pennsylvania: An Application of Trend Surface Analysis

Abstract

The use of quantitative measurements in geography has increased rapidly throughout the 1960s, and will probably continue to accelerate. It is unfortunate that those with limited mathematical backgrounds have felt intimidated by this new methodology. Even more regrettable is the fact that few quantifiers have attempted to make their work more palatable to a wider audience. The method of trend surface analysis employed here to explore an old problem—peneplanation—has many other potential applications in geographic research. The author believes that no geographer should feel intimidated by mathematical symbolism. An attempt is made to “talk-through” the technique of spatial trend analysis—one of many measurement tools already or shortly available to geography teachers and high school students via remote terminals linked to university computing centers. In addition, the concepts of the Erosion Cycle and upland accordance are reviewed and evaluated in the light of new evidence trend surface analysis now makes possible.     

Geographical categories: an ontological investigation

This paper reports the results of a series of experiments designed to establish how non-expert subjects conceptualize geospatial phenomena. Subjects were asked to give examples of geographical categories in response to a series of differently phrased elicitations. The results yield an ontology of geographical categories-a catalogue of the prime geospatial concepts and categories shared in common by human subjects independently of their exposure to scientific geography. When combined with nouns such as feature and object, the adjective geographic elicited almost exclusively elements of the physical environment of geographical scale or size, such as mountain, lake, and river. The phrase things that could be portrayed on a map, on the other hand, produced many geographical scale artefacts (roads, cities, etc.) and fiat objects (states, countries, etc.), as well as some physical feature types. These data reveal considerable mismatch as between the meanings assigned to the terms 'geography' and 'geographic' by scientific geographers and by ordinary subjects, so that scientific geographers are not in fact studying geographical phenomena as such phenomena are conceptualized by na ve subjects. The data suggest, rather, a special role in determining the subject-matter of scientific geography for the concept of what can be portrayed on a map. This work has implications for work on usability and interoperability in geographical information science, and it throws light also on subtle and hitherto unexplored ways in which ontological terms such as 'object', 'entity', and 'feature' interact with geographical concepts.     

The Fundamental and the Incidental in Geography

Abstract

An increased use of artistic literature as a resource in both teaching and research is evident in geography. With the growing interest of some scholars in the behavioral aspects of geography, traditional resources are being supplemented with more humanistic, subjective information sources. In historical geography, for example, literature is a particularly suitable resource for studies of man's role in past geographies and of human perception of past environments.¹ Specialists in regional geography and area studies also have shown a growing appreciation of such sources.² A parallel and related development has occurred in geographic education. In many different courses, but particularly in those dealing with regions, literature has become a recommended resource. The purposes of this paper are (1) to review the relevance of the novel as a resource for geographers and (2) to suggest that a current novel, Centennial, by James A. Michener,³ particularly warrants consideration for use in courses on the historical geography of the United States.     

The difference that space makes. A way to describe the construction of local and regional gender contracts

The role that space and place play in the construction of gender relations on different geographical scales is examined in this article. It is easy to identify national variations in the relation between sexes, and such comparisons are common. In many cases, the nation-state constitutes the level of analysis in gender-oriented studies. Comparative studies within nations are not so numerous. Nevertheless, geographical research has the potential to develop an analytical model capable of identifying the spatial dimension in gender constructions. A place-based approach visualises how local places shape gender relations and contribute to gender identities and understanding of men and women. This article shows how geographical analysis can be used to describe how physical and human geography interplay with economy, politics, religion, culture, etc., in the construction of gender contracts at a local level. Gender contracts are unwritten rules that regulate relations between sexes, and re-create and reform relations as everyday actions within the framework of these local structures. Together these various local contracts construct a regional structure.