Urban fieldwork in geographical education in Levanger,Norway

Despite a long tradition of fieldwork and outdoor education in Norwegian schools, teachers and pupils are not familiar with conducting systematic field studies of modern urban environments. The authors of the present article are convinced that urban fieldwork ought to be included in the teaching syllabus in Norwegian schools, and for several years they have worked on developing urban fieldwork as a part of the study programme in teacher education at Nord-Trøndelag University College (Høgskolen in Nord-Trøndelag or HiNT). The fieldwork element has gradually been expanded, and in recent years pupils from neighbouring primary schools have participated in the programme. The use of ICT has increasingly become an important part of the work in the field as well as in the follow-up phase. Special emphasis has been put on the use of digital stories. The experiences of this work are presented and discussed in the article. In the final section of the article the authors discuss further development of urban fieldwork, paying particular attention to the use of new digital technology and enquiry approaches.     

Pupils' knowledge and awareness of geography when starting upper secondary school in Norway

The author, an upper secondary teacher in geography, has conducted various surveys and questionnaires among pupils every year, for 30 years. The article examines his pupils' knowledge of geography when they start upper secondary school. During their first lesson in geography they are presented with a questionnaire designed to test their knowledge of concepts, places, and causal relationships. In addition, they are asked about their perceptions of geography and expectations when they start to study a new subject. The author finds it valuable and important as a teacher to know what his pupils have learned during their lower secondary education because such information could be used to adapt upper secondary education in geography to the pupils' abilities. Further, it is important to motivate, create expectations, and develop awareness of geography. In addition to discussing pupils' knowledge of geography, the article shows briefly how school curricula and geography teaching have changed in Norwegian lower secondary schools since the early 1970s.     

Index

America is embroiled in a culture war. National education standards have exacerbated the conflict. Supporters justify standards by adopting the rhetoric of globalization and national labor force preparedness. Opponents claim that standards threaten local control over value inculcation and social reproduction. This paper examines the “politics of scale” to hypothesize that conservatives have solicited Congressional support for local school choice and school prayer to subvert national education standards. Results from a multivariate analysis confirm that a significant link exists between Congressional opposition to education standards and support for school prayer and school choice.     

Reexamining the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Toward an Empathetic Pedagogy of the Civil Rights Movement

Geographers have assessed the success and failure of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement in terms of the African American struggle for justice, social identity, and economic survival. Conspicuously absent from the geographic literature are pedagogically oriented studies of the historical geography of the Civil Rights era. The Movement's popular image has congealed into a celebratory collection of names and dates, the sum of which is a vague, nearly mythic retelling that students might recognize but not necessarily care about. As a result, the Movement is at once contemptuously familiar yet bewilderingly strange for our students. This article offers a sympathetic critique of conventional Movement narratives, introducing the notion of empathetic pedagogy and presenting a case study of the Montgomery bus boycott. Our pedagogical approach stresses the role of empathy, both as a factor in shaping the actual sociospatial development of the Movement, as well as a strategy for encouraging students to appreciate the everyday courage and sacrifice that animated so many of its participants. Our study brings together two burgeoning literatures that have the potential to cultivate empathy among students: the critical reevaluation of mobility and explorations of subjectivity from a psychoanalytic perspective. Here mobility is understood in both its literal and figurative sense: in the case of the bus boycott, the intricate network established to literally move African Americans around the city, as well as the figurative movement of sympathy and solidarity that “moved” people to support their efforts and now informs popular, selective understandings of the protest.     

Provenance and sediment characteristics of contemporary gravel deposits at Sellicks Beach,eastern shore of Gulf St Vincent,South Australia

Sellicks Beach, located on the eastern shore of Gulf St Vincent, South Australia, is subject to wave-dominated processes and northward longshore transport. During winter, when wave energy is typically vigorous, gravel deposits are exposed across most of the beach, and three step-like berms are well developed. Sand is restricted to a narrow strip that is exposed only at low tide. In contrast, during summer, when wave energy is generally moderate to low, much of the gravel is covered by a thin veneer of sand and only the high berm, on the landward edge of the beach, remains as an obvious feature. Steeply dipping Neoproterozoic to Cambrian strata that outcrop strongly across Sellicks Hill are the original source rocks for the beach gravel; distinctive sedimentary textures, structures and fossils in the cobble-size clasts can be confidently matched with those of the provenance rocks. Much of the sediment entered the modern beach environment as a consequence of coastal erosion of transitional alluvial fan sediments. The oldest alluvial fan sediments are of late Pliocene to earliest Pleistocene age. Mount Terrible Gully provides a conduit for the input of fluvial sediment at the mouth of Cactus Canyon, where clasts as large as boulders accumulate across the beach. Sellicks Beach gravels are subject to longshore transport northwards. Relatively softer clasts, such as those derived from the Heatherdale Shale, are rare beyond Cactus Canyon. In contrast, quartzite clasts are more abundant towards the north. This lithological differentiation is attributed to preferential survivorship of clasts that are physically harder and chemically less reactive. The change in the shapes of clasts northwards, from predominately shingle-like ‘very platy’ and ‘very bladed’ at Cactus Canyon, to more ‘compact’ towards the boat ramp, is in accord with the more massive fabric of the surviving quartzite clasts. At Sellicks Beach, preservation of uplifted, coarse gravels, with entire and comminuted marine molluscan shells, of last interglacial age, provides evidence of neotectonism. At the landward margin of the beach, imbricated gravels in which pore spaces have been infilled with mud, and which show no evidence of modern coastal erosion, may provide evidence of continuing uplift during the recent Holocene. The geological setting, geomorphic framework and modern sedimentary regime at Sellicks Beach combine to provide an exceptionally useful outdoor laboratory for education in field geology.     

博雅教育理念下高校新型音乐教学模式的构建

通过对湛江师范学院公共音乐教学现状展开调研,分析了影响高校公共音乐教学的各种因素。结合博雅教育理念,提出构建以学生发展为本、激发学生学习兴趣、培养学生创造精神、增强学生实践体验的新型音乐教学模式。     

Google Earth在《城市遥感技术》教学中的应用

Google Earth软件具有免费、开放、简单易用等特点,对丰富教学资源和改善教学方法具有重要意义。基于GoogleEarth平台,在《城市遥感技术》教学中,对于遥感成像和影像特征、遥感解译标志及方法、城市遥感影像的信息提取、城市遥感专项调查等章节的理论教学,应重点运用遥感影像的搜索、标注和显示等功能;对于遥感影像地图制作、地类信息提取、演变信息提取等实验教学,应重点运用采集、存储、查询、分析、显示和输出等集成功能。实践表明,Google Earth值得在地学教育模式革新中推广。     

Geographic media literacy: an introduction

In a media saturated world of globalization, information flow and knowledge economies, an interesting paradox exists: geographic literacy appears to be on the decline while geographic information is on the rise. In this introduction to a collection of essays on geographies of the media, we explore this paradox and use Baudrillard’s (1994) work on Simulacra and Simulation to argue that increased mediated information does not produce more meaning, but rather leads to a catastrophe of meaning and the medium. Drawing from McLuhan’s axiom, “the medium is the message,” we posit that with more mediated information there is less meaningful information and as such we need to address geographic media literacy as a primary mode through which to address geographic literacy.

从现代测绘技术发展谈测绘继续教育

20世纪90年代中后期,以“3S”技术和“4D”产品的普及推广为标志,我国的传统测绘产业开始了向现代空间地理信息产业的过渡,本文从时空信息获取、加工、管理和服务4个方面对地球空间信息未来的技术发展作了简要的叙述,这对测绘行业本身、对其他行业、对整个社会发展都具有重大意义。继续教育是社会发展加快、竞争激烈的现代性产物。在高科技环境下,测绘继续教育对提高在职测绘专业技术人员的素质,适应国内外测绘行业日益激烈的竞争起着关键性的作用。     

美国“未雨绸缪(Ready)”项目及其对我国防震减灾宣传的启示

美国的"未雨绸缪(Ready)"项目致力于在全国范围内开展防灾公益宣传,包含面向企业、儿童、老人及残疾人等社会群体的若干扩展项目。自实施以来,它通过多种渠道广泛宣传减灾知识,取得了较高的社会关注度,在面向不同群体的应急宣传中发挥了巨大作用。该项目在广泛动员社会力量、细化宣传对象、充分利用现代媒体技术等方面的宣传经验对我国防震减灾应急宣传具有积极的借鉴意义。