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Expand Your Global Awareness as a Grosvenor Teacher Fellow

After a two-year hiatus, the Grosvenor Teacher Fellowship will return to host educators aboard Lindblad Expeditions’ voyages for a life-changing, field-based experience. Geography is an approach to understanding and engaging with the world around us. The geographic perspective is at the core of our work at the National Geographic Society. It’s a way of looking at the world, a way of understanding why things are … Continue reading Expand Your Global Awareness as a Grosvenor Teacher Fellow

There is a Map for Everyone

politics, sociology, biology, and math. Maps can illustrate data beyond numbers, so we can actually see the physical reality and the projection of those numbers onto a map. Once we see the visual, reality hits and the story unfolds. Then we can do something about it. Maps help people better understand their physical space, so we can digest it visually, then think about it critically. Now that I have maps as tools for understanding about what happened to Little Africa, and how history touched not only my own family, but my community, I can put them to use. I can use these maps to honor the legacy of Little Africa and to ignite conversation in my community about how not to perpetuate similar violence now. Holding a map in our hand can be the difference between causing harm or rectifying it. Continue reading There is a Map for Everyone

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“A Field Trip Anywhere”: Try This MapMaker Project With Your Students

The great news is that MapMaker was recently updated and features some incredible new tools students can use for exploration. Using MapMaker in the classroom is an easy lift to allow students to glimpse the tools of a geographer and begin to use them on their own. Teachers do not have to be fluent in mapmaking or technology to use MapMaker. In addition, using MapMaker provides an opportunity to talk about the role of cartographers and potential careers involving these skills. Continue reading “A Field Trip Anywhere”: Try This MapMaker Project With Your Students

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How My Geography Class Used Tins to Tell the Story of Place

I loved and appreciated the insights that students shared with me through their Story of Place assignments. Fast-forward to this September: we were back in the classroom full-time, and I wanted to transform the project into something more tangible. Continue reading How My Geography Class Used Tins to Tell the Story of Place

Going Beyond Black Wall Street: Opening Students to a World of Black Heritage in their Own Backyard

r over 30 years, before I ever heard about it in school. No one ever told me how our family might be connected to this history. All I knew as a child was that my mom was born in Tuskegee, Alabama (with all of its loaded history) and my dad came from Cleveland, Tennessee (a city situated next to a Sundown town known as Ducktown – the name made famous by the slogan “any Blacks caught here better duck”). And as far as I knew, we were the first generation in our family to make the journey from the deep south to Oklahoma territory. Or so I thought, but that is a separate story I am exploring in my role as a Wayfinder for the 2892 Miles to Go Project.  Continue reading Going Beyond Black Wall Street: Opening Students to a World of Black Heritage in their Own Backyard