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The National Geography Standards and Your

Undergraduate Curriculum: The Opportunity That
Knocks More Than Once
a
Howard G. Johnson
a
Department of Geography and Anthropology , Jacksonville State University , Jacksonville,
Alabama
Published online: 11 Sep 2007.

To cite this article: Howard G. Johnson (1995) The National Geography Standards and Your Undergraduate Curriculum: The
Opportunity That Knocks More Than Once, Journal of Geography, 94:5, 534-537, DOI: 10.1080/00221349508979361

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00221349508979361

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 The National Geography Standards and Your
Undergraduate Curriculum: The Opportunity That
Knocks More Than Once

by Howard G. Johnson
DEPARTMENT OF GEOGRAPHY AND ANTHROPOLOGY, JACKSONVILLE STATE UNIVERSITY, JACKSONVILLE, ALABAMA
Downloaded by [University of Auckland Library] at 15:38 30 April 2015

Geography For Life: National Geography Standards I994 offers university geographers opportunities in the
areas of program assessment and development. This article describes an assessment process that is applicable
to both individual courses and geography programs. The process can strengthen programs by making them more
consistent. As a result, geography may have a more powerful presence in teacher certification programs.
Additional techniques for enhancing geography’s role in preservice education curricula are also outlined.
Finally, the article expresses concern that geographers at the university level will not take the recently published
National Geography Standards seriously, thinking they apply only to K- 12 education. They are challenged to
extend the Standards’ scope and content to the baccalaureate degree. Key words: National Geography
Standards, assessment, presewice, teacher certification, university geography curriculum.

The National Council for Geographic Education (NCGE) has
played an integral role throughout the lengthy process which
resulted in the recent publication of Geography For Life:
National Geography Standards 1994 (hereafter referred to as
the Standards). The Council’s newsletter, Perspective, has
kept the membership abreast of the process. Executive Board
members and others have emphasized the importance of the
Standards and attempted to ready the membership to work
toward their widespread acceptance and adoption.
Similarly, the Association of American Geographers’
(AAG) past president, Steve Birdsall, and executive director,
Ron Abler, have urged that organization’s membership to rise
in support of the Standards. Birdsall regularly addressed the
Standards in his column in the AAG newsletter and made
them the focus of a formal address given at the Southeast
Division of the AAG (SEDAAG) annual meeting in Virginia
Beach, Virginia. Abler has used his monthly letter to depart-
ment chairs to feature the Standards, has provided each
department with a copy of the Standards and the executive
summary document, and has even included an article about
the Standards by Roger Downs, coordinator of the Standards
writing team, in a recent edition of the AAG Newsletter.
Despite this solid support from the AAG and NCGE
leadership, many university geographers fail to see the rel-
evance of the Standards to their research-oriented university
world. This disinterest was evident at the SEDAAG meeting
when only a handful of persons attended a special session on
the Standards. Perhaps some factor or factors other than
disinterest could explain that poor showing. There is, how-
ever, a sense that university geographers perceive the Stan-
dards as having value only to K-12 educators much as the
Guidelines for Geographic Education (Joint Committee on
Geographic Education 1984)were viewed 10 years ago. Such
shortsightedness would indeed be unfortunate, since the Stan-
dards offer at least two pairs of closely related opportunities
relevant to geography programs at the university level: 1) the
Standards offer a yardstick against which existing programs
can be measured, 2) the Standards offer an opportunity for
dialogue with faculty in schools or colleges of education, 3)
the Standards offer faculty an opportunity to create a seamless
K- 16 geography curriculum by extending the knowledge,
skills, and perspectives outlined in them through the baccalau-
reate degree, and 4) the Standards offer a challenge. What
should be included in future introductory geography courses
i f students entering college having attained the knowledge,
skills, and perspectives the Standards set forth?

ONational Council for Geographic Education

534 Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, PA 15705 JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHY
 The Standards as a Yardstick
University undergraduate geography curricula and program
requirements are reminiscent of cultural landscapes. They
tend to evolve slowly over time to reflect changes in technol-
ogy, staff composition, disciplinary trends, and institutional
or societal needs and parameters.
Much as a dune’s migration might be held in check by
vegetation, university geography curricula can become fixed
by tradition, inertia, and personalization. Even departments
that engage in periodic reviews of curriculum and major/
minor requirements find it easier to start with what already
exists rather than with a clean sheet of paper, thus making it
more difficult to effect change. This situation often applies to
individual courses within a program as well.
The Standards offer an opportunity to reassess your
undergraduate geography program from a fresh perspective.
The purpose of the assessment is to determine the extent to
which the knowledge base, skills, and perspectives put forth
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in the Standards are included in your curriculum. The end
result of this review may or may not lead to a deletion or
addition of courses, but should certainly aid faculty in evalu-
ating each course’s role in the total geographic education of
specific student groups.
A program review of this type, recently completed by the
geography faculty at Jacksonville State University, is easily
transferable to any campus. A copy of Geography For Life
was provided to each faculty member with a request that the
document be read carefully. The goal was to familiarize the
faculty with the document, not to debate its content. Faculty
members then reviewed each course for which they were
responsible, seeking to determine which standards and skills
described in Geography For Life were given thorough cover-
Figure 1. A comprehensive assessment matrix.
SEPTEMBEWOCTOBER
age. From the outset, it was understood that no single course
was expected to cover all the standards and skills, but what
was most important was the degree to which a standard or skill
was featured.
The next step involved creating matrices of the
department’s geography course offerings and the 18 standards
and five skills described in Geography For Life. Based on the
course reviews conducted in step one of the assessment
process, faculty members marked the matrix cells to indicate
which standards and skills were covered by each course in the
program. A comprehensive matrix for all courses in the
curriculum was created, as well as several variations. Figure
1represents a sample comprehensive matrix. Variations were
designed to reflect course requirements for subgroups of
students served by the geography program. For example, one
matrix contained only those courses required for majors, one
listed only courses required for a minor in geography, one
listed courses for each of the teacher certification programs
that require geography, and one listed courses included in the
university’s core or general studies program. Information
from the comprehensive matrix was transferred to the more
specialized matrices. Figure 2 illustrates a completed matrix
of courses required for a geography major.
The final step of the process entailed evaluation of the
matrices to determine whether the courses required of the
various subgroups included coverage of all standards and
skills. This evaluation revealed that two of the standards were
not covered in the courses required in the major, although they
were included in several elective courses within the program.
This assessment provided two options: 1) restructure the
required course syllabi to include the missing standards, or 2)
restructure the major core course requirements. A hypotheti-
cal version of this
situation is illus-
trated in Figure 2.
Note that Stan-
dards 2 and 17are
not included in
the courses re-
quired for a ge-
ography major,
and that Stan-
dards 6 and 13are
included in just
one course sylla-
bus. How might
Standards 2 and
17 be included?
Should Stan-
dards 6 and 13be
included in one or
more additional
courses? Is there
another course
that might be sub-
stituted into the
required list that
535
 would provide
better overall
coverage?
Information or-
ganized in this
fashion facili-
tates discussion
of the contribu- ~~ ~~
tion made by Figure 2. Sample matrix of courses required for a geography major.
each required
course in the preparation of a major. The value of this
assessment process rests not with the choice made, but with
the clarity of the options. A geography department that has
assessed its program in light of the Standards can be confident
that its graduates will understand and know each standard and
skill. This guarantees a consistency in geography majors and
leaves less to elective chance.
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Courses in the university’s core or general studies pro-
gram present a special challenge. Use of the matrix will reveal
the extent to which the Standards are incorporated into those
courses. For many students a core course, such as World
Regional Geography, may be the only college geography
course they ever take. If the goal of the Standards is to suggest
what a geographically informed person should know and be
able to do, it is desirable that geography courses in the general
studies program incorporate as many of the Standards as
possible.
Standards Create Dialogue
Closely related to the first opportunity is the opportunity to
open or enhance dialogue with colleagues in the school or
college of education. For the Standards to achieve lasting
success, not only must they be incorporated into school
curricula, but teachers must also know enough geography to
guide their students in meeting the Standards. It is therefore
critical that preservice programs in colleges of education
require students to be exposed to geography course work that
will enable them to master the standards and skills. The
challenge for university geographers is to get faculty in the
college of education to 1) listen to our argument and 2) take
some action.
Your entrCe might consist of a two-pronged approach.
First, distribute one or more copies of Geography For Life to
key education faculty, including the methods instructors. The
document is powerful; let it work for you in making a case for
geography. Education faculty will be impressed with its
content, format, and structure. Second, when you deliver the
document, make an appointment to meet again for an informal
(or formal) follow-up. This follow-up is critical. It gives you
a chance to answer questions and to utilize the matrices of
courses, standards, and skills developed earlier.
In the description of the Standards-based assessment
process above, it was suggested a matrix be made of geogra-
phy courses currently required in the various preservice cer-
tification programs on your campus. If students on your
campus are not required to take even one course, it is obvious
536
they will not be prepared to teach any of the standards or skills.
If they are required to take just a few courses, it is unlikely all
the Standards will be covered. Your matrix provides a highly
visual way of pleading a case with the education faculty and
it allows you to address specifics rather than talk in general
terms. Together you can see exactly what is and is not being
covered. You will also be able to suggest specific solutions by
using the matrix to indicate other courses in your curriculum
that would fill in any gaps in coverage. At Jacksonville State
this approach worked so well that the geographers and educa-
tion faculty restructured three certification programs to in-
clude significantly more geography course work.
The Extended Standards
Assuming the Standards represent a reasonable, desirable
overview of what might be expected in grades K-12, much
benefit could accrue to the faculty that takes the Standards and
extends them through grade 16, the baccalaureate degree. This
exercise provides faculty with the opportunity to revise,
embellish, augment, and otherwise enhance the Standards and
in the process rethink the entire nature of the undergraduate
program offered at an institution. Rather than finding fault
with the Standards, let them stand as is and build upon that
base a new layer of standards that addresses the question,
What should a student (the geographically informed person)
know and be able to do, having graduated from college with
a major or minor in geography?
Standards and Introductory Courses
The fourth opportunity associated with the Standards comes
disguised as a challenge. There is a bit of folk wisdom that
cautions, Be careful what you wish for, for your wish might be
granted. Many of us in the throes of teaching survey geogra-
phy courses in college have wished that just once it would be
nice if the entering freshmen actually knew some geography.
The adoption and implementation of the Standards may grant
us that wish, and offer the challenge, what will we then include
in those introductory-level courses? In Geography For Life,
the levels of performance suggested for grade 12often overlap
considerably with the content of college survey courses.
University geographersjustify that practice with the argument
that students have no previous exposure to those ideas and
skills, and therefore, that represents an appropriate beginning.
As the Standards become classroom reality, university geog-
raphers must restructure those survey courses or face the real
possibility of massive student turn-off toward geography
JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHY
 because of redundancy and lack of intellectual challenge.
To summarize, the recently published Geography For
Life: National Geography Standards I994 offers university
geographers opportunities in the areas of program assessment
and development which could serve to strengthen programs,
create more consistency in programs between universities,
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and result in geography having a more powerful presence in
teacher certification programs.
References
Geography Education Standards Project. 1994. Geography@ life: Nu-
tional Geography Standards 1994. Washington, DC: National Geo-
graphic Society.

SEPTEMBEFUOCTOBER 537