ARTICLE ONE

WORLD CLASS STANDARDS
Geography for the Schools of the United States

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WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF NATIONAL EDUCATION STANDARDS IN GEOGRAPHY?

An historic change is underway in geographic education with the development of voluntary national standards for what all students should learn at the conclusion of grades four, eight and twelve. These new standards clearly identify what students need to know in order to be able to live and work in successfully fulfilling ways in the twenty-first century.

The National Geography Standards published in late October under the title Geography for Life were developed through a broadly based consensus process over a two year period. Teachers parents, school administrators, professional geographers, and teacher-educators as well as people from the business and corporate sect were involved. Support for the project was provided by a grant from the United States Department of Education, The National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Geographic Society.

The National Standards are a definition of what students should know and be able to do in geography. Establishing clear standards both raises expectations and lets everyone in the educational establishment know what to aim for. Standards provide an opportunity for goal setting as a means of strengthening geography across the curriculum. Teachers, students, and parents know what is expected for success. Clear standards provide a basis to judge whether students have measured up to a well-defined and rigorous set of expectations about what is important in geography.

The standards are voluntary, not mandatory. School districts are encouraged to use them as benchmarks to evaluate their programs in geography. They are general enough to be broadly adaptable yet specific enough to provide direction and guidance to teachers and curriculum designers. In simple, straightforward, and precise language, the National Standards identify what good geography is. They also suggest ways by which it can be implemented in the curriculum.

WHY DO SCHOOLS IN THE UNITED STATES NEED GEOGRAPHY STANDARDS?

Education in the United States has never had national standards in any of the subject areas. In their absence, a serendipitous and generally accidental national curriculum has developed based largely on standardized multiple-choice tests and mass-market textbooks. As a result, expectations for student performance have been vague and imprecise. Many educators believe that such a haphazard approach has encouraged a minimal development of skills structured on a limited knowledge base rather than a focused curriculum stressing the ability to solve problems and apply learning to real world situations.

Improving education in the nation's schools begins with agreement about what students should learn and what they should be able to do with what they learn. When no one can agree on what curriculum content should be, then each part of the educational system pursues different, goals. What results is inequity and inefficiency.

While the National Geography Standards are not designed to impose a federally mandated curriculum on the nation's schools, they do encourage educators at all levels to incorporate the National Geography Standards' content, skills, and perspectives into existing local programs of study. Such efforts will assure that instruction in geography will range well beyond the standard place location exercises with maps so typical of geography study in many classrooms to challenging activities that will require students to use the content of geography to make informed decisions about environmental, societal and economic problems.

HOW ARE THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHY STANDARDS LIKELY TO CHANGE THE TEACHING OF GEOGRAPHY IN THE SCHOOLS?

As Geography for Life becomes increasingly more familiar and accepted by state departments of instruction and local school districts, significant changes can be anticipated. The impact factor of the National Geography Standards includes:

--Textbooks will change to include the content recommended by the National Standards.

--Assessments will change to test whether students understand what they have learned in geography.

--Instructional methods will change to emphasize reasoning problem solving, and higher-order thinking skills as well as the practical applications of geography.

--Programs in teacher education and staff development will change to prepare teachers to present the content of the National Geography Standards in meaningful and challenging ways to their students.

--New technologies will become more commonplace to help teachers and students expand the range of content and skill development suggested by the National Standards.

WHAT'S INNOVATIVE ABOUT THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHY STANDARDS?

The National Standards encourage teachers to take geography beyond place location to realms illustrating that geography is the integrative study of Earth as the home of the human family. The content of the National Standards has been organized in a way that will encourage teachers to develop geography programs that challenge students to understand the interaction between physical and cultural phenomena. Although nothing is new in the Standards, they place a special emphasis on these three areas of inquiry.

SYSTEMS

These are analytical tools that help students understand complex relationships by encouraging them to take a holistic approach rather than studying things in isolation.

The Standards use systems to organize both the human and physical content of geography so that students will understand the relationships an interaction between the two. Where people elect to build cities and lay out interstate highways, for example, is strongly influenced by the physical features of an area.

PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY

Most social studies programs have presented geography exclusively as a cultural study. The Standards recognize that it is both a physical and human science and place considerable emphasis on physical geography so that students will have a better understanding of such phenomena as climate and weather, land forms, the processes responsible for the formation of Earth as well as the natural hazards that so often disrupt human activity.

EMPHASIS ON ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION

The Standards challenge teacher to include topics about the environment as a part of their geography instruction. Specific National Geography Standards, for example, relate to ecosystems, resources, the impact of physical systems on people, and an examination of how people modify physical system. In addition, the Standards encourage the responsible use of the environment through planning and the organization of sustainable programs of development.

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From Ubique
Notes from The American Geographical Society
Peter Lewis, Editor
Volume XIV, Number 2, December 1994