Summary
This session is geared toward teachers and teacher educators who want to think more strategically about improving teachers’ abilities to plan a critically-oriented geography curriculum. With the goal of exploring and advancing notions of geographic consciousness, the session offers examples and insights from a Miller-funded geography education research project. The project sought to understand the extent to which two pedagogical tools (curriculum artifacts and vignettes) could improve secondary teachers’ geographic “knowledge work” and “curriculum thinking.”
Session participants will explore/ discuss sample curriculum artifacts and vignettes in consideration of their utility for both pre-service teacher education faculty and practicing educators. Findings will demonstrate the extent to which educators were able to use geographic (disciplinary) knowledge to both understand and challenge the logics of society and environment in their lessons (and therefore enhance students’ geographic consciousness).
Given the contentious political and environmental times we are living, positioning geography as a visible and critical component of the social studies is more important than ever. The session asks audience members to a) consider this positioning within teacher education and b) re/consider how we first prepare, and then later develop, geography teachers. Importantly, both require enhancing teachers’ abilities to recontextualize critical elements from the discipline for K12 classrooms.
Session Focus
All Grade Levels | Physical & Environmental Geography, Human and Cultural Geography | Curriculum and Instruction
Conference Room
Reynolds Leadership Circle
Meet the Presenter
Kelly León is an Assistant Professor of Social Studies Education at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay (UWGB). Previously she worked in teacher education at San Diego State and for 19 years, as a social studies/human geography teacher for a large urban school district, where she led efforts to reconceptualize and update her district’s required geography course. Kelly completed her undergraduate degree, bilingual teaching credential, and M.E.d in Policy Studies in Language & Cross-Cultural Education at San Diego State University and her PhD in Education for Social Justice at the University of San Diego. Her research interests include geography education, educational/social justice, and teachers’ knowledge work and curriculum-making
