Transformative Geography: Ethics and Action in Elementary and Secondary Geography Education

Abstract

Geographic ethics are profoundly important if students are expected to be stewards of the earth and responsible citizens whose decisions about the environment will affect our planet's future. The proposed framework, founded in geography but applicable to other subject areas, guides students to moral decisions for the well-being of the planet and its people so that geographic skills will be applied for beneficial purposes. It is in the tradition of Kropotkin, Dewey, and Freire and introduces Nel Noddings' concept of caring to geography education. This proposed framework for the elementary and secondary levels is called transformative geography.     

Applied Geography and New Geographies

Scale and resolution have long been key issues in geography. The rapid development of analytical cartography, GIS, and remote sensing (the mapping sciences) in the last decade has forced the issues of scale and resolution to be treated formally and better defined. This paper addresses the problem of scale and resolution in geographical studies, with special reference to the mapping sciences. The fractal concept is introduced, and its use in identifying the scale and resolution problem is discussed. The implications of the scale and resolution problem on studies of global change and modeling are also explored.     

What Was Applied Geography?

The terms “pure'’and “applied'’were used in connection with mathematics and the sciences in the Nineteenth Century and were affixed to geography no later than 1890. This paper is a review of some early occurrences of the term “applied geography'’in the period 1890–1904.     

The Geography of Education and the Education of Geography: Agricultural Extension and the Political Ecology of Education

The spatial nature of learning is increasingly a focus of geographic inquiry. I argue that the spatiality of education, which is where formal learning occurs, has the potential to shape students’ spatial imaginaries. I analyze the role the spatiality of agronomic education plays in the historical construction of the social and physical landscape in southeastern Pará, Brazil. In opposing ways, the first Green Revolution, and agrarian social movements’ more recent agroecological Green Revolution are found to structure agronomic education and spatial imaginaries. The perspectives of agricultural extension agents trained in traditional agronomic programs are compared with teachers from an agroecological school located in an Amazonian agrarian reform settlement of Brazil's Landless Workers’ Movement. I collected these data over 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork. To analyze these data, I employ a political ecology of education perspective, which highlights how education and political economy interact to mediate relations with, access to, and contestations over natural resources. The geography of education and the education of geography exist in a complicated feedback cycle: Education is not neutral but ideologically charged and affects conceptions of productive landscapes, providing students intellectual and economic power to put their visions of landscape into effect.     

On the Emergence of an Applied Geography

The application of geographic concepts and techniques to solving human problems is gaining new strength as a dimension of American geography. The nature of this trend is being shaped by a concern for relevance and educational change. Adoption of this approach has many implications for the individual geographer, as well as for the discipline. Some possible negative and positive aspects of the trend are suggested.     

Everyday work: A survey of the 2014 Applied Geography Conference

A selection of application papers presented at the 2014 Applied Geography Conference in Atlanta, Georgia are included in this special issue of Applied Geography. The wide-ranging topics of the papers reflect the many directions Geography is applied to solve practical issues in our society.