Which Way Libya? : Teachers Orient Themselves Geographically

During a dinner-table discussion on the importance of American students learning about foreign cultures, Elsie Begler’s 9-year-old daughter, Jennifer, wanted to know about requirements for foreigners. She volunteered: “What about people who live back in New York?”

For the elder Begler, who directs a special program to train geography teachers, the question betrayed a problem of increasing concern to American educators: We simply don’t know where much of anything is, let alone what goes on there.

In a National Geographic Society-sponsored Gallup Poll released last week, 18- to 24-year-olds in the United States were asked to pinpoint 13 countries, Central America, the Persian Gulf and the Pacific Ocean.

The average U.S. score--6.9 correct out of 16--ranked below that of young adults in all of the eight other countries surveyed. Older Americans fared only slightly better, outdistancing their counterparts in Italy and Mexico.

Appalling but No Surprise

“It was appalling, but it wasn’t a surprise,” said Helen Benefield, an English teacher at Hilltop Junior High in Chula Vista who is developing a combined foreign language-culture program for her school district.

Benefield, like many teachers, is willing to shoulder some of the blame for the geographic ignorance. On a quiz in a recent educators’ newsletter, she admitted getting only 50% right. Among the items she missed: “What U.S. states border the Pacific Ocean?” and “Name the five Great Lakes.”

The embarrassed Benefield said she forgot Alaska and Hawaii, and could only remember three of the lakes. (They are: Superior, Huron, Erie, Michigan and Ontario.)

“That’s flunking. And I’m a good memorizer--I probably got A’s when I learned the stuff,” she said.

Benefield and 47 other K-12 teachers from Southern California were doing something about the problem Thursday. The teachers are participating in a two-week institute at San Diego State University designed to help them teach geography better, and to teach their school district colleagues to teach it better.

While the horror stories are hardly scarce, such workshops as “Global Education Concepts: Conflict,” “Tracing Personal and Family Migration Routes (Elementary)” and “Cooperative Learning Techniques” are filled with educators committed to their own learning and that of their students.

“We encourage teachers to actively involve students in the process--and rather than tell them that, we actively involve them in what we’re doing,” said Begler. An anthropologist and educator, Begler directs the 5-year-old International Studies Education Project with support from SDSU, UC San Diego, local school districts and other sponsors. It is the first ISEP summer session to deal exclusively with geography.

Enthusiasts at the project’s summer program, which is partly funded this year by the National Geographic Society, take the project seriously; there’s even a workshop on analyzing how the program works.

Teachers aren’t paid to come to SDSU’s program, one of three state-subsidized geography workshops in the state. “As a condition of their attending, they’re obligated to conduct their own, districtwide workshops when they get out,” Begler said.

Besides increasing education funding and improving the way television reports world events, Begler said, there’s no better way to make the facts stick with students. “The multiplier effect is a great technique.”

Diane Bailey, who develops social studies curriculum and trains San Diego Unified School District elementary teachers, said she will be taking important lessons in both form and content back to work with her. “The message is that a lot of kids and teachers think that geography is a dry subject, but it can be fun if it involves them personally.”

In one of the workshops Thursday, called “Whose Place Is This?” teachers worked in pairs and then groups analyzing prevailing attitudes in different countries toward sex and race from photographs in magazines.

Afterward, the instructor asked them to suggest things they would have to find out before making conclusions. “It’s important to have students question their own ideas, and it can be good to have them do follow-up projects,” said instructor Jane Boston.

Begler, a firm believer in teaching by example, stressed teaching skills among the educators themselves and allowed plenty of free time and discussion periods; the SDSU hallways resounded with the ideas of excited learners.

“There needs to be more than memorization. You can get real enthusiasm from the kids if you make it real for them,” said Laura Kuhlken, a veteran of two previous training sessions.

“I went into a mentor teacher’s first- and second-grade combination class, and she had them broken up into continents and (tracing the origin of the components of) an alarm clock. And the ship the clock (was exported on) had a Greek crew and was registered in Libya. They knew Greece was in Europe, and they even knew where Libya was,” said Kuhlken, an elementary schoolteacher in La Mesa.

“I was with a reporter from the (San Diego) Union at the time, and he said: ‘Gee, I didn’t know where Libya was.’ ”