By Katherine Hansen
Medill News Service
WASHINGTON - Teachers have heard the tales of woe.
One in seven Americans can't identify the United States on an unmarked world map, and one in four can't locate the Pacific Ocen
But when students return to school this fall, two Lincoln area teachers hope to rewrite the Story by putting geography back on the map.
Greg Nelson, an eighth-grade history teacher at Pound Junior High School in Lincoln, and Julie Zitek, a third-grade teacher at Milford Elementary School, are spending part of summer vacation here at the National Geographic Society's Summer Geography Institute. The four week session refreshes their memories of geography and emphasizes teacher empowerment by showing them creative ways to integrate a once-boring subject into their social studies lessons.
"I'm hoping that when I go back to Lincoln I'm be able to talk to the members of the school board and explain to them more precisely how geography is important to the curriculum and how it needs to be strengthened," said Nelson, a 14-year veteran of the Lincoln school system.
The mission of the institute is to use interactive lessons to train teachers in the latest methods and show them how students can build on rote geography skills, according to Harris Payne, an Omaha North High School teacher and an instructor at the institute.
In one of Payne's lessons, teachers mapped the travel of radioactive clouds from the Chernobyl accident across Eastern Europe to analyze human and ecological impact. Payne pointed to the lesson as an example of how teachers can strengthen students' basic geography skills by linking them to other disciplines.
"They have to know place names in order to map where the clouds go, they have to know longitude and latitude, and they have to be able to read an atlas to talk about land uses," Payne said.
As a condition of their participation, Nelson and Zitek are required to share their lessons with fellow teachers back home by holding three work shops in their districts in the upcoming school year.
"I think all of our teachers in Milford are really aware that there's a need for this," said Zitek, who has taught at Milford for two years. "The Institute, for me, is something to take back for my own use in my classroom to get the kids excited, and I'll be able to train teachers in my school about some ideas to use in their own class. rooms."
According to Nelson, geography is not required as a separate class in the Lincoln curriculum, so it's often up to teachers to integrate geography lessons into existing social studies classes - a task that many find difficult.
"I think the frustration comes from teachers who would love to teach geography and don't really have that opportunity," Nelson said. He plans to include the Chernobyl lesson in his peer workshops and classes this year.
Nelson, Zitek and 98 other teachers from 27 states, Puerto Rico and Canada will graduate from the institute this week.
Photo Caption :
Greg Nelson (right), an eighth-grade teacher from Lincoln, works with other teachers to match newspaper headlines to maps and photographs at the four-week Summer Geography Institute.