Geography and STEM: A New Legacy

Sunday, September 9, 2012 - 2:00pm

Recently, I sat in a third grade classroom watching a geography lesson. I was specifically interested in seeing what instruction students received on map skills. I observed the teacher as she reviewed continents and oceans with the students using a large cloth map on which students took turns applying labels. She then used an interactive white.board to introduce latitude and longitude and absolute location.

After the bell rang, I asked if there were any additional lessons on latitude and longitude? The answer was startling, but not shocking: No, that was it. For the rest of the year. 

If the current emphasis on the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines is not a flash in the pan but the start of a long-term trend in American education, I think things will look very different in that third grade classroom within the next three years. Yes, there will be more math and more science—along with a continued focus on reading and language arts, I assume—but there will also be more geography.

While the elementary social studies curriculum as a whole has been “squeezed” by the demands of No Child Left Behind, geography is in an unique position among the social studies disciplines. While history, civics and economics may lose instructional time, geography will certainly gain ground. Start with the standards: If you look deep enough within the Pennsylvania geography standards, for ex.ample, you’ll find expectations that during the third grade students will, “Identify the effect of the physical systems on people within a community,” “Identify the effect of people on the physical systems within a community,” and “Identify the basic physical processes that affect the physical characteristics of places and regions.” These tasks certainly require science, technology, engineering and math; more importantly, study of the STEM disciplines in any logical, real-world context should also lead to these same topics.

However, a STEM-influenced geography curriculum will look very different from the traditional approach that I described above. True, students will still learn about the continents and oceans or latitude and longitude. However, they will be using different tools to answer different questions. For example, rather than use a cloth map, students will use Google Earth to view satellite imagery of continents, the oceans, weather patterns and the interaction of the natural and built environments. Instead of sitting in the classroom, students will learn outside with location-aware devices such as global positioning system (GPS) units or smartphones to observe latitude and longitude and watch values change as they move relative to the equator and prime meridian. In short, students will be doing geography, not just learning about it. 

At the same time, they’ll be doing math: Mark off a second of latitude and a second of longitude and see where that takes you. Why, in the United States, is a second of latitude larger than a second of longitude? Or estimate: If I walk to the other side of the park, how many seconds of longitude will I cross? If I take a bus to Philadelphia, how many degrees of latitude will I drop? For students of science and engineering, the satellite system that communicates with GPS units is truly incredible—the algorithms they use provide a rare, everyday example of the Theory of Relativity in action.

Among the social studies disciplines, geography has been in decline for the past several decades. Many colleges and universities no longer have a geography department; high schools typically no longer require students to take a stand-alone geography course. The sole pro.longed exposure to the field now happens in middle school, where students often take a single course, sometimes only a semester long. This trend may change due to the influence of STEM initiatives as well as the growth of topics such as global warming, immigration, arms proliferation, pandemics, overfishing, cyberwarfare, water purity and a globalized economy—to name a few.  The 21st century is going to be an exceptionally bad time to be ignorant of world geography.

The good news is that the same third-grade classroom that I observed is indeed experimenting with a revised geography curriculum that integrates science and math. In collaboration with our college’s teaching, learning and technology program, teachers are using GPS units to teach latitude and longitude and conduct enrichment activities such as measuring the height of neighborhood trees using latitude and longitude measurements and Google Earth. The students then use the measured height, along with the tree’s circumference and species, to estimate the weight of the tree and how much carbon is stored within it. 

The final step of the activity is to compare the carbon stored in a tree with the amount of carbon released from a common daily activity: driving. They are surprised to learn that by driving between my building on Lehigh’s campus and the elementary school, a mere four miles, I release more than a pound of carbon into the air. When we multiply that by all the miles driven by all the cars in the world... well, we’re going to need a lot more trees, not to mention technologies for reducing our carbon footprint.

Through this integration of geography, science and math, students can see the need for engineering and thoughtful uses of technology. I’m also hoping that they’re highly motivated to solve some of the massive problems our generation will leave them with. 

—By Thomas Hammond, assistant professor of teaching, learning and technology at Lehigh University.