Page 155 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

CHAPTER 6 How Can I Teach Geography and Anthropology Powerfully? 127
Developments in Geographic Knowledge
Research on children’s geographic knowledge indicates that it accumulates gradually across the elementary years. Preschool and early elementary children tend to identify with their own country and to be aware of at least some other countries, although they usually do not possess much specific knowledge unless they have traveled abroad. Their beliefs combine accurate information with stereotypes and misconceptions. This is espe- cially true of their ideas about Africa, which tend to emphasize images of jungles, wild animals, witch doctors, and people starving, living in huts, and living primitive lives generally (Palmer, 1994; Wiegand, 1993).
Primary-grade children have difficulty understanding nested geographical relation- ships (e.g., local community within the state, within the region, within the nation, and within the hemisphere). However, they can learn these relationships through exposure to map-based instruction, and there is some evidence that their understandings have improved in recent decades (Harwood & McShane, 1996).
Primary-grade children’s knowledge about their own country is mostly vague and symbolic, and their knowledge about other countries is even more vague and often rid- dled with stereotypes or misconceptions. American children typically develop positive attitudes toward their country, say that they are happy to live in it, and select positive adjectives as descriptive of it. These tendencies are less pronounced among minority group members and are not always observed among children from other countries. (Much depends on the country’s history and the kinds of messages about it to which children are exposed.)
These early positive attitudes toward the home country are not necessarily accompa- nied by negative attitudes toward other countries, but as children begin and progress through elementary school, many acquire at least temporary negative stereotypes of par- ticular nations or world regions. As they learn more, they come to appreciate that there are both positives and negatives about any nation (Barrett, 2005).
Our own research (Brophy & Alleman, 2005) identified several generic characteristics of K–3 students’ thinking that mediate their understandings of geographical information. First, the children tended to focus on individuals, families, and local settings. They rarely made reference to effects of events on the nation, let alone the world or the human con- dition at large. For example, when asked about how the invention of printing changed the world, most of them said that the people who made books no longer had to copy them by hand or that the people who read them found them easier to read, rather than saying that printing made it possible to make multiple copies of books much more quickly, so that many more people would have access to them.
Second, although they were familiar with human actions relating to cultural universals that they could observe in their homes and neighborhoods, they usually knew little or nothing about how and why these practices vary across locations and cultures. Few chil- dren have much knowledge about the affordances and constraints that local geography provides even to people living in their region until they develop basic knowledge of the range of local geographies in the world and the trade-offs they embody.
Third, their thinking reflected a child’s rather than an adult’s purview. In talking about the location of their ideal home, for example, they seldom mentioned convenience to good schools or to the parents’ job sites (instead emphasizing convenience to parks and restaurants). When asked about why most settlements were located initially around rivers or bodies of water and later around rail lines, they talked about people wanting to go swimming or take a ride, but not about transportation connecting the settlement to other communities and facilitating the exchange of resources and products. When asked why the Chinese eat more chicken and rice and Americans eat more beef and bread,
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