Bearing fruit: Establishing geographical literacy in K-12 education

Social Studies Review, Fall 2001 by Cunha, Stephen F

"As the world grows smaller and more interdependent daily, our country's future absolutely depends on our ability to see the connections between ourselves and our global neighbors."

-Gilbert M. Grosvenor (2001)

INTRODUCTION AND PURPOSE

Put simply, the study of geography is the study of "the why of where." When that understanding is not provided in California's classrooms, the world simply won't make sense to our students. This article offers the reasons why geography is such an important component of K-12 education and describes the basic concepts that all students should come to know and understand. It is broken into three parts; the first provides a rationale for including geography in the curriculum at every level, including the early grades. The second section outlines the specific content that should be learned from the National Geography Education Standards (GESP 1994) and the six geographic elements in the more recent Scope and Sequence in Geographic Education (NGS 2000). The final section assesses how geography and the geography standards are integrated into the California History-Social Science Framework (SBE 2000). A companion article by Carl Zitek describes specific classroom activities that incorporate the elements (or themes) introduced below.

GEOGRAPHY AS A TOOL FOR NAVIGATING THE 21ST CENTURY

Consider the banana. Consumption by California adults probably exceeds the amount kids furtively chuck, conceal, or donate in the school lunchroom. The bananas we eat overwhelmingly originate in Latin America. For less than one US dollar per day, compesinos, machete the fruit off trees to load aboard coast-bound trucks. In seaports like Veracruz, Panama City, and Guayaquil they are hand-transferred to container ships bound for the payload ports of Houston, Los Angeles, and Oakland. More hands hoist the fruit from truck, to warehouse, to the supermarket crib, where we pay 500-1000 percent above the original value.

A 1988 Gallup poll commissioned by the National Geographic Society revealed that U.S. students were seventh out of eight industrial countries in their knowledge of geography. Most school kids could not identify the world's major culture regions or trace migration routes, or even locate the continents (Gallup 1988). Thus most of our school children couldn't position major banana growing countries like Ecuador on a map, let alone Mexico or even South America. Ditto for the location where their toys are manufactured (China) and their favorite shirts likely stitched (Sri Lanka). That they can't identify these places, along with the oceans, deserts, and mountains that connect them is one tragedy. Murphy (1998) explains a second and more sobering problem:

For many Americans, the term geography conjures up images of long lists of capital cities, mountains, and rivers. Memorize these and you are said to be geographically literate. Ignore them and risk embarrassing yourself when playing trivia games. Such images of geography are often forged in elementary and secondary school classrooms where cursory attention (at best) is given to where things are located-and then only as a prelude to discussions of social, historical, or environmental issues. Geography comes across as dry location facts; it is something to be dispensed with before the interesting material can be confronted.

Geography's disappearance from American classrooms during the 1960s is now ancient history. Since then, the discipline has made a stunning comeback in K-12 and university education, in government agencies, and in business. Geography was one of five core subjects identified in the President's Goals 2000. A new Secondary Human Geography AP Exam debuted last year, and a Physical Geography exam is forthcoming. College and university enrollments are surging. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and spatial analysis are now an essential environmental planning tool.

However, these assessable advances are being counteracted by the meteoric rise of high stakes testing which is driving not just geography, but all social science teaching underground. This refutes our long history of curricular diversity.

As educators debate for or against curricular inclusion of geography (or biology, art, physical education, etc.), two things are certain. First, American students study less geography and are less proficient in geographic knowledge than their cohorts in other industrialized countries.

Secondly, this trend arrives as the frenetic pace of globalization-the emergence of NAFTA, GATT, and WTO into household lexicon -makes geography more important today than ever. Again and again we are reminded that the spatial perspective that is notably deficient in American students. Moreover, the emerging World Wide Web provides unprecedented global information at our fingertips, and the geographically proficient will travel farther and faster on the information superhighway than those who cannot connect people, space, and place. In summary, "an understanding of both physical and cultural geography is no longer an option for those who would successfully navigate twenty-first century society" (Boehm 2000, page 1).