The lack of geographic knowledge and cultural dynamics should not surprise educators. Geography is no longer required as a separate discipline in many school districts and indeed often is dropped from the curriculum after elementary school where it is studied on a limited scale--usually in the third and fourth grades. Few students have the ability…

Geography is not what it used to be. Nowadays, that subject is often buried--and therefore inadequately covered--in a social studies curriculum itself under siege because of the extended commitment in schools to reading and math. But geographical knowledge also is not what it used to be. It has become essential to understanding a brave new world…

This article examines whether questions embedded in geography textbooks address three components of spatial thinking: concepts of space, tools of representation, and processes of reasoning. A three-dimensional taxonomy of spatial thinking was developed and used to evaluate questions in four high school level geography textbooks. The results…

PlacesOnLine.org is a Web portal that provides easy access to high quality Web sites that focus on places from around the world. It is intended for use by a wide range of people, including professional geographers, teachers and students at all levels, and the general public. This article explores the potential uses of PlacesOnLine as an…

Films are often used in schools to illustrate geography, but doing so may favor mainly passive learning. An experiment with twenty-eight pupils aged thirteen years (a whole class) had the aim of using cinema to promote active geographical learning. First, it was ascertained what the dominant geographical stereotypes were among the pupils and the…