School Revolution : Geography: More Than Just Maps

By PATRICIA WARD BIEDERMAN

June 30, 1987 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

Muncel Chang, a geography teacher at Taft High School in Woodland Hills, leads a class of students onto Ventura Boulevard. They linger in front of the Chateau, a huge white office complex that looks like an enormous wedding-cake decoration.

“How does this building,” Chang asks, “fit into the landscape of the community?”

A lively discussion ensues. A student notes that the building’s white surface reflects heat, a sensible choice in the sometimes scorching San Fernando Valley. Others point out that the building is pretentious in scale and design, its dozens of Greek-style columns a strange note on a thoroughfare whose dominant architectural styles are fast-food and Spanish.

Chang’s students may not know it, but they are part of a revolution in the teaching of geography in elementary and secondary schools.

Intelligible Environment

A new breed of teachers is making geography more than just maps and memorization of state capitals. It is, Chang said, a tool that allows students to see things they have only looked at before. Geography helps make their environment intelligible.

In response to mounting evidence that most young Americans are geographically illiterate, geography is making a comeback. In many states, including California, the public school curriculum is being rewritten to give geography greater prominence.

The image of the subject has improved. Once widely regarded as dull and undemanding, geography is increasingly viewed as a challenging social science that integrates information from many disciplines and provides insights into how we live in the world.

Glitzy Materials

Teachers of the subject, traditionally under-prepared, are being retaught. New materials, glitzy in a way that a pull-down wall map of the world never was, are being developed to aid in the teaching of the resuscitated discipline.

Those in the field say the changes are overdue.

Once a staple of the American school curriculum, geography has fallen on hard times since World War II, when youngsters were routinely taught the locations of Iwo Jima and Bataan. Only 14% of American secondary-school students took geography courses in 1960-61, University of California President David P. Gardner reported last year in the Annals of the Assn. of American Geographers. By the mid-1970s, the figure had slipped to 9%.

The decline alarms geographers and educators who insist that there should be more, and better, geography in the schools. To bolster their case, the reformers point to signs that American students are breathtakingly ignorant about where things are, the first step in geographic understanding.

Among the glaring examples of this ignorance:

- A survey this year found that 25% of the high school seniors tested in Dallas did not know that Mexico is the country south of the United States.

- At the University of North Carolina in 1984, fewer than half of those tested identified Alaska and Texas as the largest states. Only 21% knew that Rhode Island and Delaware are the smallest.

- In a poll of freshmen at St. Mary-of-the-Woods College in Indiana in 1984, 95% could not locate Vietnam on a map of the world.

- Eighth-graders did so poorly on the geography component of the 1985 California Assessment Program test that state school Supt. Bill Honig said: “Our students are more illiterate in geography than in anything else.”

The reform-minded have found a wealthy, well-connected patron in the National Geographic Society.

Clout for Reform

Best-known as the publisher of the yellow-edged magazine that no one ever throws away, the society is also a vast scientific and educational institution, with 10.6 million members worldwide, that has decided to put some of its resources and clout into reform of geographic education.

Education reform is the pet project of society President Gilbert M. Grosvenor.

“I’ve been worried about geographic education for 10 years,” Grosvenor said in a recent interview in his Washington office. “I didn’t really think it was as bad as it is, but it was clear to me 10 years ago that we needed to do more work in schools.”

Grosvenor, 56, great-grandson of Alexander Graham Bell and the fifth member of his family to head the National Geographic Society since its founding in 1888, makes it clear that educational reform is what he thinks the society should be doing as it approaches its centennial.

This year the society will spend about $4 million on geography in schools. Some of it will finance two pilot programs, one at Audubon Junior High School in Los Angeles and the other in the District of Columbia, in which new approaches to teaching geography are being tested.

The society has distributed more than 6 million free maps of the United States to American schoolchildren since the beginning of 1986. It is retraining dozens of geography teachers annually at summer institutes. (Chang attended one last summer and will teach in one this year.) And it is supporting alliances of geographic reformers in 13 states and the District of Columbia.

Computer Software

The society has committed additional money to other education-oriented projects. It recently formed a company with Apple Computer and Lucasfilm Ltd. to develop geography-oriented software for computers and materials for video disc and compact disc players.

It has also committed $2.5 million to a project with the National Science Foundation and the Technical Education Research Centers of Cambridge, Mass., to establish a computer network that will allow thousands of elementary school students throughout the country to do sophisticated studies of acid rain and other projects that combine geography and science.

The education project is not as flashy as some the society has backed in the past--Robert E. Peary’s race to the North Pole, Jacques Cousteau’s undersea adventures or the Leakey family’s research into the African origins of man. But to Grosvenor, it may well be more important. “They don’t even have maps on the walls anymore!” he said of American schools.

National Geographic’s interest has accelerated a reform movement that was already under way, observers say.

“National Geographic gives us two things we never had before--unbelievable visibility and a hell of a lot of money,” said Richard G. Boehm, a professor at Southwest Texas State University and a past president of the National Council for Geographic Education. “I’ve seen more happen in the last year than in the 20 years before that.”

Rise of Social Studies

The consensus within the profession is that geography was highly valued and widely taught in the United States during the exploration-crazed 19th Century. It began slipping from the curriculum after social studies were introduced early in the 20th Century. In Grosvenor’s view, the rise of social studies meant an emphasis on history in most classrooms--and the burial of geography.

In many other countries, including Great Britain and the Soviet Union, geography remains a respected separate discipline. As a result, said Gail Hobbs, who teaches earth science and geography at Los Angeles Pierce College in Woodland Hills, “Many of my foreign students know more about the United States than my American students do, which is an embarrassment.”

At the center of what Boehm calls the peaceful revolution in geographic education is Christopher L. (Kit) Salter, 48. Formerly an associate professor of geography at UCLA, Salter is to leave Los Angeles this month to become head of National Geographic’s education project.

In 1983, Salter, described by one observer as the country’s premier reformer of geographic education, founded a group called the California Geographic Alliance. “It was involved with one simple question,” Salter said: “How in the world can we get educators in America to be attentive to geography--and not geography that is simply state capitals?”

Salter invited a cross-section of people to join his cadre of geographic reformers: university professors, community college faculty, secondary school teachers and educational administrators.

‘Cosmic Attempt’

In Salter’s view, the study of geography begins with establishing where things are, then quickly proceeds to explaining why they are there and how places relate to each other and to the people who occupy them.

Ultimately, he said, “geography is this cosmic attempt to understand the environment of humankind.”

Hobbs, president of the California Geographic Alliance, added, “To think that a geographer only teaches place names is like thinking that a literature teacher only teaches the alphabet.” Geography, she said, “is concepts and ideas,” and map reading and other geographic fundamentals “are basic skills, as important . . . as learning to read and write and count.”

“Geography helps students to become observant,” said Cathy Riggs-Salter, wife of Christopher Salter and the director of the geography pilot program at Audubon Junior High School in Los Angeles.

Like Chang, Riggs-Salter has her students study local geography as well as that of distant countries. “It gets them to look at a place, even if it’s just their neighborhood, and see how it relates to other places. . . . You have to teach them how to look, how to read the landscape.” She might ask her students what houses with grills on the windows reveal about a neighborhood, for example.

‘The Why of Where’

Riggs-Salter said that some ninth-graders come into her World History-Geography course not knowing east from west. By the end of the course, she expects them to be able to probe what has been called “the why of where.”

“Geography doesn’t explain everything in history, but it sometimes explains why an event happened where it did,” Riggs-Salter said. She said she believes that historical events occur at a juncture of time and space--and that the space is equally worthy of examination. She asks her students, for example, to analyze the role “General Winter” played in destroying Napoleon’s army in Russia.

According to the new geographers, most geography teachers are almost as innocent of the subject as their students. “So often the football coach teaches geography,” Grosvenor said. “Well, I’d like to have the geography teacher teach football.”

According to Salter, geography teachers have less training in their specialty than any other group of teachers. In 1982, according to Gardner, 20% to 30% of the country’s 5,000 upper-level geography teachers had never taken a college course in the field. Only 10% were geography majors.

In 1985 the California alliance sponsored the first summer institute for geography teachers at UCLA, with support from the university. The idea, Salter said, was to inform and inspire teachers who would then share what they had learned with other teachers, as well as with their students.

Highest Priority

National Geographic adopted the institute idea in 1986. Fifty-one teachers completed the Washington program last year, and 65 will be trained this summer. Each teacher is expected to hold at least three workshops for colleagues when he or she goes home. (UCLA also continues to offer the summer programs.)

Curricular reform is perhaps the highest priority of the new geographers.

South Dakota, not known as an educational trend setter, is one of the few states that require successful completion of a formal geography course for high school graduation.

In California, members of the first geographic alliance have succeeded in beefing up the quality and amount of geography in the public school curriculum. In 1984 Salter co-chaired the statewide committee that wrote the model curriculum standards for combined history and geography courses for grades nine through 12. As a result, Salter said, “There’s more geography than there’s ever been in the California curriculum.” (Even better, he believes, would be separate courses.)

Alliance members also helped write the state’s new curriculum guidelines for the teaching of history and social science. Diane Brooks, head of the social science department in the California Department of Education and a charter member of the California alliance, said, “This new framework places history at the center of the curriculum, with geography right next to it, because these are the great integrative disciplines in the field.”

12-Year Curriculum

The guidelines, for which approval by the state board of education is expected this summer, call for the teaching of geography every year from kindergarten through 11th grade. The California guidelines are of national significance, because they are usually closely followed by textbook publishers eager to get a piece of the nation’s largest textbook market.

Grosvenor sees the alliances as an effective way to encourage the grass-roots reform and promotion of geographic education in the individual states, where curriculum decisions are made. This year the society is supporting 15 state alliances, including two in California and one in the District of Columbia. It plans to add seven to its network next year. The society provides each group with an annual operating grant of about $10,000 for three years, materials and other assistance.

Grosvenor has also made his pitch to state governors. Virginia Gov. Gerald L. Baliles has committed funds for a state institute for geography teachers next summer, with matching funds from the society. The governors of Alabama, Florida, Colorado and Tennessee have also earmarked state funds for geography.

The recent snowballing of interest in geography prompted one old-timer to exclaim: “Geography has become kind of chic!”

Perhaps no aspect of the new geography is more glamorous than National Geographic’s decision to join with Apple Computer and Lucasfilm to develop new kinds of teaching materials. Grosvenor explained: “We hope to produce highly visual, exciting, in-depth geography programs. In other words, can Lucasfilm do to geography as it has done to ‘Star Wars’?”

No Skywalker Drilling

None of the collaborators will reveal detailed plans, but it is safe to assume that Grosvenor and the others have something more sophisticated in mind than Luke Skywalker on video disc, drilling youngsters on the capitals of the states.

The project is expected to exploit the remarkable storage capabilities of video and compact discs. Libraries of information, including still and moving images, music and narration, can be stored on the discs. This information could then be made available to teachers and students on their computers.

National Geographic has always been fascinated with new technologies, particularly optical technologies. It was a pioneer in the development of color, aerial and underwater photography. National Geographic magazine was also the first, in 1984, to use a laser-produced hologram on its cover, followed in 1985 by a second cover hologram of the million-year-old skull of a 5-year-old child.

In Grosvenor’s view, the schools have failed to exploit the visual image, the moving image, to engage students. Effective deployment of the visual image in its magazines, films and other materials is one of the great strengths of National Geographic, he believes. “We’re fortunate,” he said. “We were visual long before TV. . . . What really makes us successful is that we were a visually oriented institution at the right time in history. Schools are not taking advantage of that.”

Spellbound by Geography

Grosvenor looks to a future in which students are spellbound by geography videos and no teacher teaches “The Merchant of Venice” without analyzing the geography of the Venetian city-state. He wants to see the day when colleges require geography for admission (as does the University of Colorado at Boulder), forcing elementary and secondary schools to institute appropriate geography courses.

Society insiders say Grosvenor wants better geography education to be his personal legacy, just as the telephone was his great-grandfather’s. Grosvenor denies it. “I’m human,” he said, “but I try to divorce my own ego, my own tombstone, from the organization. I just think this is what we should be doing now.”

Grosvenor said he will not know he’s successful until he hears the screams.

“Until somebody screams that geography is replacing their program in the school, then I’m pretty well assured it hasn’t. We really look forward to the day when we’re criticized for putting too much emphasis on geography. Then I’ll know at least we’re being heard.”

A QUICK QUIZ Here are five questions from a test devised by the National Council for Geographic Education. A high school student with a solid geographic education should be able to answer all five correctly, according to council officials.

1. The Copper Belt of Africa is beneficial to what two countries?

A. Namibia and South Africa.

B. Zaire and Zambia.

C. Tanzania and Kenya.

D. Botswana and Zimbabwe.

2. Which has the most hours of daylight on Dec. 21st?

A. Los Angeles.

B. Portland, Ore.

C. Buenos Aires.

D. The Equator.

3. Population density depends on the relationship between

A. income and population.