In July 2022, the University of Tennessee and the Tennessee Geographic Alliance hosted a three-week summer institute funded by the National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) as part of its "A More Perfect Union" initiative to promote a deeper understanding of United States history and culture. Eighteen K-12 educators from across the country…

Minerals and metals are part of everyday existence, including in the air people breathe. They are either in, or have a hand in creating, nearly all of consumer products. As essential as they are, minerals and metals are too often unseen, unappreciated, and unnoticed. In the teaching of preservice primary and secondary teachers as well as high…

High schools offering dual-credit geography options are looking for ways to enrich student experience. This article explores a university-high school collaboration, part of the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh Cooperative Academic Partnership Program (CAPP), in a dual-credit World Regional Geography course offered at Barneveld High School,…

The National Council for Geographic Education (NCGE 2023) promotes a number of principles that are central to the work of the STEMSS (STEM + Social Studies) project. Among these principles is the understanding that geography education is a bridge to better understanding and appreciation of all subject matter. Using geography education as a bridge…

This paper introduces four local field studies designed and conducted by two Advanced Placement Human Geography (APHG) teachers. All of these activities were designed for ninth-graders taking APHG courses. Both teachers implement multiple instances of field study in different units of the APHG curriculum throughout the academic year (e.g., two…

The purpose of this article is to introduce two easy-to-use analytical tools--OPTIC (Overview; Parts; Title; Interrelationships; and Conclusion) and SCRAP (Spatial-Temporal; Conditions, Connections, or Comparisons; Region; Aura, Association, or Analog; Pattern or Exceptions)--that can help teachers guide student learning with maps and photos.…

In this paper, the authors introduce a student project that can help students stay engaged in Advanced Placement Human Geography (APHG) classrooms through the end of the year, through a project that can be implemented after the APHG exam is given. The tight curriculum schedule of APHG leaves little room for implementing student-centered learning…

The Advanced Placement Human Geography (APHG) exam consists of two sections: sixty multiple-choice questions (MCQs) and three free-response questions (FRQs); both sections have equal percentages in the exam weighting (College Board 2020). Because the main motivation of the students taking this course is to earn college credit by scoring a three or…

Discussions are one of the activity types that help students build their content-related background knowledge, understanding, and concepts through various communication approaches. Students express and share their perspectives and ideas with other students through a small- or large-group discussion. The formats of discussions may vary; they may be…

When a student remembers an educational geography activity involving a map twelve months later, the events count as a step toward spatial understanding. Giant playground and floor maps capture students' attention and inspire teachers to develop new ways to explain geographical features and phenomena. For almost a decade, National Geographic…

"Local foods" are inherently geographical, rooted in space and place. Students can explore local foods from multiple geography angles. This introduction highlights some of these potential angles as applied to ice cream shops in New York State. Teachers are encouraged to adapt this lesson to fit their own needs and appropriate local food…

Place-based learning of a community develops from the collective, experiential learning of many generations and is referred to as Indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) (Stevenson 1996; Ajibade 2003). Africa is rich in indigenous knowledge of edible insects and plants which have bolstered communities in times of food shortage (Hunter et al. 2007).…

The food experience involves much more than physical nourishment but also the practice of acquiring, preparing, and sharing food that defines the foodscape. This lesson will look at the term foodscape and describe its application to Mexican migrants developed in the thesis "Transnational Mexican Foodscapes in Colorado Springs" (Greenleaf…

Models are an important tool for geography teaching, as they can be used to represent features of human and/ or physical systems. In addition, they enable the student to identify with the demonstrated reality, since they work with iconic images and symbols specific to each culture, used to represent the elements contained in the models (da Silva…

The World GeoHistoGram (GHG) is a flexible graphic organizer that can be used to support many different instructional strategies and activities. This visual resource offers teachers and students a way to organize knowledge into a geographic and historical framework. More important, the GHG is one of the first instructional products designed to…