Geography for Life: National Geography Standards 1994
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Click here to go to a page that lists the 18 National Geography Standards.
GEOGRAPHY FOR LIFE
by Roger M. Downs
Geography for Life, the new geography standards that you hear people talking aboutwhy do they matter to you . . . and to your students? What are you supposed to do with them in your class? You use the five themes; how do the standards fit with the themes?
Fair questions, because someone is always suggesting that classroom teachers should do things differently. But curriculum change is costly and demanding, especially for you, the teacher. As I hope to make clear, adopting the standards will be worth it; new doesnt mean totally different; geography is geography, as exciting as ever; and standards. . . .
Well, the word standard, itself, can be intimidating. It has echoes of conformity and imposition; it suggests barriers that sort students into those who pass and those who dont; and it rings of rigidity and inflexibility. In geography, nothing could be further from the case.
Standards, as they apply to our field, are a definition of what students should know and be able to do in geography. They are a voluntary way of raising the level of achievement of all students in geography. They are a policy document that points to the future and presents expectationshigh expectationsfor all students, K through 12.
October 20, 1994, is a key date in the history of geography education. The official publication on that day of Geography for Life: National Geography Standards 1994 marked an important transition from development to implementation, from theory to practice. The written documenta statement of educational goals in geographywas developed from what we know about geography and educational theory.
The National Geography Standards are a response to the 1994 Goals 2000: Educate America Act. The third of those National Education Goals states, By the year 2000, all students will leave grades 4, 8, and 12 having demonstrated competency over challenging subject matter including . . . geography, and every school in America will ensure that all students learn to use their minds well, so they may be prepared for responsible citizenship, further learning, and productive employment in our nations modern economy.
The words of Goal 3 are important because they shaped the process by which the geography standards were written. Now that the standards exist, how do they affect educational policy, geography content, and classroom practice?
Standards offer attainable benchmarks along the way to increasing competency in geography; they do not contain prescriptions as to how to get there. The standards are not a curriculum, and there are none of the details that make a curriculum work in the classroom. What they do offer is the framework for a scope and sequence statement. They present what a student should know at the end of grades 4, 8, and 12. It is up to curriculum designers and teachers to fill in all of the steps along the way from kindergarten to high school.
The National Geography Standards were produced under the sponsorship of the four major geography organizations: the American Geographical Society, the Association of American Geographers, the National Council for Geographic Education, and the National Geographic Society. Thus they are a statement not only for all the people interested in geography but also for all the major players in geography education.
The standards are a consensus statement, produced in a way that allowed as many people as possible as many opportunities as possible to shape the document. Over a two-year writing period, 140 people worked on the six drafts that led to Geography for Life. These people included K-12 teachers from public and private schools, school administrators and PTA members, college and university faculty, and government and business officials. Another 216 people responded in writing to these drafts, and 130 people testified at nine public hearings.
But consensus about what? What is in the National Geography Standards? The writers worked under a series of guidelines from the United States Department of Education. Five of these guidelines are particularly important for understanding the structure and content of the standards:
(1) Standards must be world-class and challenging;
(2) standards must focus on a limited set of the most important and enduring knowledge and skills that a discipline offers;
(3) standards must be useful in developing what is needed for citizenship, employment, and lifelong learning;
(4) standards should reflect sound scholarship within the discipline; and
(5) standards should be developmentally appropriate.
Geography is a big subject; how do you decide what is most important and most enduring? The title, Geography for Life, is the key to understanding what is in the standards and why it is there. As the opening sentence in the first chapter says, Geography is for life in every sense of that expression: lifelong, life-sustaining, and life-enhancing. That idea is elaborated later: Geography is empowering in practical contexts. Geography is enriching by helping humans understand their personal experiences. In other words, geography matters to peoples lives, and everything was selected with that idea in mind.
The goal is simple: to create a geographically informed person, someone who understands people, places, and environments from a spatial perspective, someone who appreciates the interdependent worlds in which we all live. Those worlds all come together into the contexts that shape our lives: the school, the family, society in general, and occupations and careers. These contexts matter, and geography matters because it can help us to understand and appreciate those contexts.
The ideas that you will read in Geography for Life draw on the best of the experiences of teaching geography in other countries; those experiences set the context for the idea of world-class. But the particular choices of content and emphasis are based on what Americansparents, employers, and the public at largeneed and want from a systematic program of instruction in geography.
So what did we choose to include? How exactly did we make the choices? Geography is concerned with earth as the home of people. To convey that idea, we made two decisions about what to include. First, in order to look at the world geographically, students need to integrate an understanding of subject matter with skills and perspectives. Take a simple example, someone looking at a newspaper map of tropical rain forest destruction in the Amazon Basin. To understand this map, you have to know something about cartography, how maps are put together; you have to understand spatial context (the Amazon as a river in the equatorial region of South America) and spatial scale (it is a huge area); you have to know about ecosystems and people and migration and economic development. You have to think about the spatial pictureworld trade in hardwoodsand ecological perspectivespossible impacts on global climate. In reading this map, knowledge, skills, and perspectives are inseparable; that is true for all of geography.
Second, the geographical way of looking at the world is broad: it encompasses physical and human dimensions, science and the humanities, systematic and regional approaches, environment and society, considerations near and far, local to global, practical to theoretical. All of these ways of looking at the world come together in the example of the map of tropical rain forest destruction in the Amazon. Geography asks us to see connections between places, to approach questions of where and why from as many perspectives as possible.
We took a comprehensive and integrative view of the discipline of geography because that is what geography itself does and that is what teachers need in order to have flexibility to tailor instruction to their classroom, their skills and interests, and their community.
Given the two choice criteriaintegration and breadthhow do you organize the resultant mass of important and enduring material into something that is comprehensible? After all, many of the people who will be asked to teach geography do not necessarily have muchor anyformal training in the field. This understanding of the audience had two consequences: on the form of the standards and on the sequencing of ideas in the standards.
In terms of form, we have produced two documents with two different purposes and two different audiences. One document is the executive summary, a heavily illustrated 32-page case statement for geography, which addresses questions such as What is geography? Why is it important? What do the standards look like? This is aimed at the two ends of the spectrum of which you, as a teacher, are the center: education policymakers and parents. With the executive summary, we want to convince both of these groups of people that geography is indeed indispensable and that it must be part of every childs school experience.
The second document, the main document, is intended for you, the classroom teacher. It is long272 pagesbecause we tried to anticipate the sorts of things that you would need in order to develop a curriculum and lesson plans. The first chapter is a statement about what geography is and why it is important. The ensuing chapter introduces the three components of geography educationsubject matter, skills, and perspectives. The core of the main document is Chapters 3 through 8. They outline geographic skills and perspectives, present essays on the subject matter of geography, and detail the standards for each of the three grade levels: 4, 8, and 12. In Chapter 8, you will find descriptions of student performances: what a child aspiring to a standard, at a standard, or beyond the standard level would be able to do on the basis of geographic knowledge, skills, and perspectives. There is an extensive glossary of terms and an index to help you find your way around the standards.
We designed the document with you, the teacher, in mind. What do the standards look like, and how can you relate them to what you already know and teach?
Organizing the Subject
The subject matter is organized into two levels. At the first level, geography is divided into six essential elements. By essential we mean necessary; we must look at the world in this way. By element, we mean a building block for the whole. At the second level, each essential element contains a number of geography standards, each of which contains a set of related ideas and approaches to the subject matter of geography.
There are 18 standards. Because we cannot discuss all of them here, lets pick one essential element, the World in Spatial Terms, and look at one standard to get a sense of what the content of geography looks like when it is converted to standards language. The World in Spatial Terms is the beginning of geography; if we study the relationships between people, places, and environments, then we must do so by mapping information about them into a spatial context. And so the first standard, the first of three in this element, is how to use maps and other geographic representations, tools, and technologies to acquire, process, and report information from a spatial perspective. Broad, yes, but deliberately so.
To help you focus things on your classroom and your needs, there is an essay explaining the standard. Then, for each of the three grade levels, there is a section explaining the things that the student should know and another section explaining the things that the student should be able to do. And finally, there are sets of learning opportunities suggesting what you and your students might be able to do with these ideas in the classroom.
The standards are designed to be worked with, added to, refined, reorganized. And as you do that, you will find strong connections with the familiar five themes of geography education that were outlined in the 1984 Guidelines for Geographic Education. In other words, the standards offer one more step along a path that many teachers have been following for years.
The standards are a big step forward because they give geography a national prominence in education policy. But equally well, they give you the chance to feature geography at the local level in your classroom. Applicable and relevant to all states and school districts, the standards are designed to allow you to place different emphasis on the material, to select different examples, to teach the ideas in different ways. Standards are voluntary, and they will work only if you can feel comfortable with them and can make them work for you.
As teachers interested in and committed to geography, you and I know that the power and beauty of geography lies in the ability to understand the web of relationships among people, places, and environments. Helping us share that knowledge is the point of the National Geography Standards.
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Roger M. Downs, professor of geography at the Pennsylvania State University, was writing coordinator and one of the authors of the new geography standards. Downs served as Geographer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society from August 1995 through June 1996.
Geography for LifeThe New Standards appeared in the Spring 1995 UPDATE, the newsletter of the National Geographic Societys Geography Education Program. This article may be reprintedwith permission from the UPDATE Editorin nonprofit, educational publications. Contact Roger Hirschland, UPDATE Editor, National Geographic Society, 1145 17th Street N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036-4688.
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