Page 156 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

128 Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students
most talked about cultural differences in preferences (e.g., the Chinese like rice but Americans like bread), not about geography-based differences in patterns of crop plant- ing and animal raising.
In general, the children showed limited awareness of environmental affordances and constraints that help explain contrasting cultural and economic practices as well as little awareness of the land-to-hand progressions involved in processing natural products or creating manufactured ones. When asked how developments in communication and transportation had “shrunk the world,” most failed to grasp the metaphor and were unable to respond. Although their answers to geographic questions (when they were able to generate answers) reflected limited geographic exposure and a child’s purview, most were valid as far as they went. However, some children did communicate clear mis- conceptions, such as the idea that rivers flow inland from the oceans or that highways are literally high (elevated above the surrounding land).
Some geographical misunderstandings are easily corrected because they are rooted in word ambiguities (the term “country” can refer either to a nation or to a rural area) or in generalizations of associations or stereotypes (assuming that polar bears live in Antarc- tica, that penguins live at the North Pole, or that everyone who lives in or near a jungle pursues a hunter-gatherer lifestyle) (Scoffham, 1998, 2000). Other confusions may take longer to overcome because they require more complicated explanations (e.g., downflow of fresh water from higher elevations creates rivers that eventually reach sea level and flow into the salt water oceans) or because they involve abstractions that are difficult for children to remember (e.g., cities are located within states which are located within the nation), or require specific coordinates (e.g., map symbols, scale, directional coordinates).
Problems with Geography Texts and Teaching
Opportunities for developing geographical understandings are not used effectively in most elementary classrooms. Research on elementary geography textbooks and teaching typically reveals an emphasis on miscellaneous and often trivial facts rather than on understanding and using powerful geographical knowledge. Textbooks typically stress the physical aspects of geography over its human aspects and feature parades of facts presented without sufficient attention to connections, explanations, or critical thinking (Beck, McKeown, & Gromoll, 1989; Brophy, 1992; Haas, 1991). Similarly, studies involv- ing interviewing teachers and observing in classrooms indicate that teachers’ planning, instruction, and assignments relating to geography focus on map work and factual details (e.g., capital cities, major exports) without much emphasis on understanding why places are where they are and have the characteristics that they do (Farrell & Cirrincione, 1989; Muessig, 1987; Stoltman, 1991; Thornton & Wenger, 1990; Winston, 1986).
A major reason for this lack of attention to powerful ideas is that teachers usually possess only limited knowledge of geographical information and of geography as a disci- pline, which is not surprising given their limited and somewhat distorted exposure to the subject as students. Along with confusion about the nature of geography and about what aspects of it to teach, other problems include instruction in incorrect or out-of-date facts or concepts (such as an oversimplified environmental determinism as an explanation for human behavior in a particular place), a need to balance an emphasis on regions with a global perspective stressing our interdependent world, and tendencies toward ethno- centrism or stereotyping in treatments of other cultures.
Geography was strongly represented as a discipline taught on its own in late nine- teenth and early twentieth century curricula, but it gradually became subsumed into the broader field of social studies in the mid-twentieth century. However, geography has been making a comeback lately, in response to poor performance by American students
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