Details and assesses the life and education career of Susanna Rowson, particularly her involvement with geography education in the early United States. Discusses her childhood, career in the arts and on the stage, novel writing, educational career, geography textbooks, and relations with other early U.S. geographers. (DSK)

Presents a survey on the degree of training in geographic-information systems (GIS) given to prospective geography teachers. Reveals that only a handful of programs intentionally expose student teachers to GIS in a meaningful manner. Discusses implications for plans to integrate GIS into the curriculum. (DSK)

Much like the cycles and rhythms of the seasons, implementation of the national geography standards in Colorado has, over the course of a decade, grown, developed, and changed. As with the exciting beginning of spring, our time of planting was set in motion in 1993 by the passage of Colorado House Bill 1313, which set a deadline for school…

In summary, this highly conceptual activity helps middle school students understand that the lines on the contour map represent intersections of the surface of the landform with regularly spaced horizontal planes. Building the landform and relating its features to the contour map offer many opportunities for visualization, all grounded in concrete…

This paper discusses the Geography Faculty Development Alliance (GFDA), a five-year project begun in 2002 with funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation. The purpose of the foundation is to improve professional development opportunities for early-career geography faculty members in U.S. colleges and universities, and to improve the…

This paper examines and reflects on the activities of the International Network for Learning and Teaching Geography in Higher Education (INLT) from its founding at the Association of American Geographers' Annual Conference in Hawaii in 1999 to the post-International Geographical Congress workshop in Glasgow five years later. It provides a context…

This article focuses on geographical education in Greece and Cyprus (Southern Cyprus). The two countries have different sets of books for their educational systems, approved by the relevant Ministries of Education. Since the teaching of these officially approved sets of books is compulsory, the context of geographical education in these countries…

Since the late 1980s, changes have occurred that have had a fundamental impact on Initial Teacher Education (ITE) in England. There has been a move from a model dominated by the higher education institutions (HEIs) to a school-HEI "partnership." High stakes inspections have been given a greater role by the government and this has led to…

While there has been research into children's geographical and environmental understanding, comparatively little has provided insight into children's perspectives on their geographical learning. Some depth of understanding is available about children's personal local environmental experience and about spatial cognition, but there is much about…

The use of field classes and the need for university master planning are presented as a way to enhance learning. This field-oriented, goal-oriented approach to learning is proposed as a general model for university-level geographic education. This approach is presented for physical geography classes, but could also be applied to other subdivisions…

Geography, long the neglected step-child of the field of social studies education, evinces signs of emerging as one of it key integrating elements. Its prominent inclusion and embellishment in both national and state standards and state assessments bodes well for its future. Higher education's role in this endeavor is paramount. The successful…

National Geography Standards for the middle school years generally stress the teaching of latitude and longitude. There are many creative ways to explain the great grid that encircles our planet, but the author has found that students in his college-level geography courses especially enjoy human-interest stories associated with lines of latitude…

This article discusses modern stereoscopic displays for geographic education, focusing on a large-format display--the GeoWall. To evaluate the potential of the GeoWall, geography instructors were asked to express their reactions to images viewed on the GeoWall during a focus group experiment. Instructors overwhelmingly supported using the GeoWall,…

This study brings in a comparative approach regarding pictures involved in secondary school (14-17 ages) textbooks taught in Turkey. In this respect, following the classification of pictures (line drawings and photographs) included in secondary school education geography textbooks, evaluation of the photographs in books in question in terms of…

The aim of this research is to examine how children use visual variables to represent nominal and ordinal data on thematic maps. Greek students from first (six- to seven-year old), second (seven to eight-year-old), and third grades (eight- to nine-year-old), without any systematic cartographic experience, were invited to participate in the…