People nowadays communicate with each other in many ways. Beyond sending letters and postcards, Internet services such as e-mail, blogs, chatrooms, instant messaging, and video conferencing are used. It should be no surprise that children love to get mail too, and it is nice to know that the envelope-and-stamp variety has not lost its charm.…

Elementary social studies has used the same scope and sequence for more than a half century despite significant changes in society. Efforts to reform the curriculum are adversely impacted by inertia, tradition, the culture wars, traditional state autonomy in setting curriculum, publishers, and competition between disciplines for space within the…

The Delaware Geography-Health Initiative is a Web- and GIS-based set of lesson units for teaching geographic concepts and research methods within the context of the state's high school geography standards. Each unit follows a research-based, inquiry-centered model addressing questions of health because of Delaware's high incidence of cancer,…

This article presents a field technique that exposes students to the indirect effects of habitat fragmentation on plant distributions through studying edge effects. This assignment, suited for students in an introductory biogeography or resource geography class, increases students' knowledge of basic biogeographic concepts such as environmental…

The purpose of our study was that of analysing, starting from literature, the definitions of the following concepts: capacity, skill, and competency, as well as of analysing the competencies they phrased in school curricula and those that teachers phrased. Moreover, we wanted to give appropriate examples. The hypotheses of our study were the…

The literature on service learning in geography courses has established and substantiated the importance and usefulness of such projects for student learning. In this paper the assumption is questioned that similar sets of benefits accrue to "community" participants, those involved who are located outside the university context. The…

Foreign-born instructors are an integral part of the US education system. While universities see them as contributing to internationalization, many students, parents and legislators are concerned about their impact on students' educational achievement. Supported by data collected from students and professors, the author identifies the main…

So-called "radical" and "critical"pedagogy seems to be everywhere these days on the landscapes of geographical teaching praxis and theory. Part of the remit of radical/critical pedagogy involves a de-centring of the traditional "banking" method of pedagogical praxis. Yet, how do we challenge this "banking" model of knowledge transmission in both a…

This paper is about how the transformatory pedagogical practice of popular/liberatory education can be further articulated within geography. It is based on the experiences of a third-year undergraduate course, "Autonomous Geographies", in which the author developed some of the core values of popular education, namely engaging with…

Geography as a school subject is highly infused with values and controversial issues. Much attention has been paid to the role of the (geography) teacher in dealing with values education, but the continued lack of pupil-focused empirical work hampers conceptual, practical and policy development. Drawing on evidence from pupil-focused research, it…

Fieldwork remains the mainstay in the study of geography and in the analysis of the environmental processes. However, an in-depth understanding of the environmental and geographical processes requires extensive as well as intensive fieldwork that involves time and substantial effort, both of which may pose a problem within a given curriculum time.…

University instructors are increasingly drawing on active learning exercises to engender critical thinking skills among students. In this article, we introduce the design and implementation of an active learning exercise about mobility and transportation that we assigned in an introductory human geography class at the University of Georgia. The…

Geography increasingly relies on training of professionals who can apply geographic concepts to solve real-world problems. The planning profession for years has been training professionals to work in the area of community planning. Planning programs typically include experiential learning modules throughout the curriculum. This article looks at…

Six unsatisfactory ways of approaching geographic concepts in the classroom are presented. An alternative that would promote global-mindedness and the development of accurate mental maps in students is discussed in terms of teaching techniques. (JH)

Making and using needle-sort cards fosters logical thinking, facilitates accumulation of factual knowledge in geography and can be applied students at any grade level. (JH)