For the last few days I’ve been in DC, participating in the National Geographic’s Road Map to GeoLiteracy Project. What’s geo-literacy? Here’s how my colleague Danny Edelson defines it – understanding how the world works, how the world is connected, and how to make reasoned decisions. He has ambitious goals, to have a large proportion of young people develop geo-literacy competencies by 2025.
Towards these efforts, I participate as a member of the Road Map’s Education Research Group. We’ve been designing the framework for organizing our research agenda questions, likely to be grouped around our abilities to formulate geographic questions, analyze spatial variability, and construct and share accounts of our interpretations. We do these things as we understand our world in spatial terms. Focusing on a K-12 project is new for me, and only infrequently do I come into contact with geography’s well-crafted National Standards. However, our agenda reaches into higher education as well, especially as teacher preparation is concerned, and this is all highly relevant and significant for our Spatial Literacy for Educator’s program.