Teachers Live on Edge With the Geography of Suburbia : Education: They’re studying use of local settings for classroom lessons in seminar hosted by Moorpark school district.

The classroom is Ventura County. The subject: geography.

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Or, more specifically, “Living on the Edge: Geography of Suburbia.”

Whether they are visiting farms, dropping by the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza or strolling through Moorpark, about 20 teachers taking part in a two-week geography seminar are learning about more than places and names. They’re studying how to use local settings for classroom lessons on geography.

“If you can gather materials from the local level, the lessons become much more real for the students,” said Mel Dick, a Thousand Oaks High School teacher.

The seminar, which continues through the week, is being sponsored by the California Geographic Alliance and the National Geographic Society, and hosted by the Moorpark Unified School District. Similar seminars have been held at major universities throughout California, but this is a first for Ventura County.

The hope is to push the teaching of geography in schools and to combine geography instruction with other subjects, organizers said.

“This is really a pilot project to see how effective these seminars can be on the local level,” said Frank DePasquale, assistant superintendent in Moorpark and an organizer of the event.

A trip to two local farms covered a quick history of farming in the county, soil science and environmental issues, DePasquale said.

“You realize the power of geography to teach other subject areas,” he said. “You can integrate math, science, history and even literature into lessons.”

The seminar is also an attempt to invigorate teachers, said fellow organizer Marilyn Renger, who teaches a computer class at Ventura’s Balboa Middle School.

“We want to fire them up,” Renger said Tuesday during a computer training class in Moorpark.

Judging by the whoops from a few participants playing a computer geography game, it sounded as though the seminar was working.

The hollers came from Willa Greeley, who teaches fourth grade at Moorpark’s Flory School, and Signe Smale, a first-grade teacher at Ventura’s Elmhurst School.

The pair had just spent an hour absorbed in “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?”--a game that makes players use the computer to search the globe for clues to find a criminal.

After four failed attempts, the pair had all but solved the mystery and could not contain themselves.

Sitting nearby was a smiling Nancy Nauman, a special education teacher at Balboa Middle School. She said the whole seminar has been exciting.

“I was skeptical about it,” Nauman said. “I didn’t really want to give up two weeks of my summer, but it’s been phenomenal.”

She said she plans to team up with another teacher and take her class on Metrolink to learn about the subway system and mass transit.

“The lessons are so engaging, you wouldn’t believe how much and how quickly the students can learn,” she said.

Paul Fredette, a shop teacher at Balboa, said he plans to integrate a geography lesson to teach his students about where various woods come from. As part of that class, he expects to cover environmental issues and some history.

Seminar organizers hope that teachers like Fredette will tell other instructors about what they have learned and start a groundswell of interest.

“We’re committed to making this work,” DePasquale said. “We want to see how the teachers integrate what they’ve learned here in the their own classrooms.”