Lex Chalmers

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New Directions in Geography

• Lex Chalmers
• Keynote Presentation (i)
• Geography for the 21st Century Symposium
• University of Hong Kong
• 18 June, 2005

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Themes within the presentation

• New Governance of Geography
• Cartography, Geography and GIS
• New Cultural Geographies

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New Governance of Geography

• The costs of education and health
• Education for all

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New Governance of Geography

• Geography in the curriculum -ELAs
• The Geography entitlement

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New Governance of Geography

• The Charter on Geographical Education provides an
  internationally endorsed statement that affirms
  the important contribution geography makes to
  education and to citizenship
• It links easily to the (draft) Proposed New
  Senior Secondary Curriculum and Assessment
  Framework (2005)

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• The International Charter on Geographical
  Education
• Revised 2006 Edition
• Commission on Geographical Education
• International Geographical Union
• Contents
• Preface
• Challenges and responses
• Questions and concepts in Geography
• The contribution of Geography to the education of
  the individual
• Geography in a broader educational context
• Teaching geography
• Principles and strategies for implementation of
  Geography programs
• Research in geographical education
• International co-operation
• Proclamation

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Cartography, Geography and GIS

• Geographies and Cartography

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Geographies and Cartographies

• The basics can not be forgotten. These include
  skills in map use/interpretation, along with
  skills in map making.
• These skills are often learned with reference to
  physical geography contours, slopes and
  symbology.

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Geographies and Cartographies

• Cartographic skills in geography are often
  examined in formal education using quite standard
  practice.
• Before we move to look at new directions in
  cartography, we can review the basis on which
  these developments build.

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What we see is a topographical map analysis at
Year 11. This traditional assessment model
requires development of reasonably high levels of
skill, as the following questions indicate.
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Benchmark skills Topographical Map
Interpretation at Year 11 Note the emphasis on
physical geography The connection to field work
in geography is useful. Field work provides a
link through the requirement to make maps of the
field.
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Geographies and Cartographies

• What can we add to this that is new? We can add
  thinking skills to practical skills in
  cartography by using new ways of representing
  places.
• Look at the next three examples and think how
  they challenge the notions of Cartesian space
  that underpin our field and map making practices.

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Rather than use Cartesian co-ordinates, this map
maker has used travel time to represent
space. Auckland becomes closer to Wellington than
Hamilton when in metric distance it is 100 km
further away.
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Cartograms are also provocative ways of getting
people to think about different geographies
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Computer based visualization of landforms also
allows effective representation of geographical
spaces
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Cartography, Geography and GIS

• but just as important is the recognition of new
  analytical technologies specifically the impact
  of GIS on contemporary cartography

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This example from the ESRI Map Book (1997) shows
that a range of mapping techniques are readily
available to represent physical geographies of
areas. There are, of course no guarantees of
cartographic quality.
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Visualization product showing Mt Diablo and
different routes plotted to show the options
available for recreational use. This cartographic
representation if from the ESRI Map Book, 1997,
p.26
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A crime map from the ESRI Map Book of 1999, shows
San Diego and how cartographers can use the
buffer technologies available in GIS to show new
human geographies
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Cartographers are starting to use 3-D
visualization techniques to represent the built
environment of major cities
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• Most of you will be aware of the power and
  functionality of GIS in Geography. While I use it
  in research, and it is the technology of our
  childrens future, we may need 5 years to work
  GIS into national classroom effectively. I
  acknowledge the commitment of the k-12 programme
  in the USA.
• The following clip from ESRI launch documents for
  ArcGIS 9.0 offers some useful comments on the
  prospects for such classroom use.
• ESRI software is not cheap, but ArcExplorer is a
  free downloadable utility that has already proved
  its value in our Geography classrooms.
• http//www.esri.com/software/arcexplorer/download.
  html

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Arc Globe

• Arc Globe is another piece of software that adds
  to our capacity to map and analyse geographic
  space. It is a key visualization tool, that
  allows pan and rotated views of the Earths
  surface.
• An effective description of ArcGlobe is contained
  on the ESRI website.

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Cartography, Geography and GIS

• The new ArcGlobe tool for environmental mapping
  is a cartographic product with particular appeal
  in the landscape visualization area.

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Cartography, Geography and GIS

• Availability of classroom data to map has always
  been an issue.
• The prospect of cartography on demand is
  increased by the prospect of Internet Map Serving
  (or IMS)

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Pre-history of IMS

• First, Al Gore didnt invent the internet.
  Nelsons hypertext, DARPA-Net and many other
  strands get woven into the history of the
  Internet
• Tim Berners-Lee in 1990 is the most frequently
  cited reference base.
• Late 1993 is the launching pad NY Times,
  Guardian and Economist, along with Xerox
  developments at PARC

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The History of IMS

• Effectively, it took less than two years for
  internet cartography to become a standard
  service. MAPQUEST generated 130m maps in 1996.
• The major GIS corporates took slightly longer to
  capture the initial benefits of map serving.
  Looking back, thin clients and broadband were
  always going to provide expansion paths for local
  delivery of map functions and data.
• But, map serving is only the start of interactive
  cartography.

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IMS as a classroom facility

• What the internet allows is for us to load data
  from one or more servers and then add our own
  field data. It can provide a basis for virtual
  field trips.
• So we could load a map of a river valley from a
  website, then include measurements and water
  quality data we capture in the field. New ways
  of representing the physical geography of places?

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IMS as a classroom facility

• There is an effective description of the Internet
  Map server on the ESRI site
• http//www.esri.com/software/arcgis/arcims/about/f
  eatures.html

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Changing track Human Geographies
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Cultural Geographies

• There are obvious, but not exclusive, links
  between cartography and physical/environmental
  geography.
• New cultural geography is an expression that
  turned up in the geography literature at about
  the same time as IMS.

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Cultural Geographies

• New cultural geographies require us to move from
  practical geography skills more to those that are
  in social and thinking areas.
• The links to the Objectives on pages 4-5 of your
  draft Curriculum and Assessment Framework are
  easy to make

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Cultural Geographies

• (1.11) Enquiry skills identify and ask questions
  from geographic perspectives.
• Draw out meaning from information and determine
  what to believe and what not to believe.
• Show respect for all peoples, their cultures,
  values and ways of life
• In my view, some challenges of new cultural
  geographies are more difficult for us to work
  with because they are not incremental, but rather
  they involve a challenge to orthodoxy.

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Cultural Geographies

• The era of the post arrived in university
  Geography post-structuralism post-modernism and
  the post-colonial
• We need to understand post in the sense that
• it does mean after the epoch of modernism,
• but it also means against. These ways of
  thinking
• challenge what has gone before.
• From my point of view, these ideas brought a lot
• of energy into the discipline, they have
  informed my
• thinking, and they have changed some of the
  things I do.
• Most of what I do is still scientific but I
  recognise
• different and multiple perspectives.

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Cultural Geographies

• In a sense, I had to be come a new learner at the
  same time as I was a teacher.
• I faced the challenge implicit in the phrase
  curriculum development, and I did this through
  looking at documents like the Charter

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The Charter says learners should develop
knowledge and understanding of

• locations and places in order to set national and
  international events within a geographical
  framework and to understand basic spatial
  relationships
• major bio-physical systems of the Earth
  (landforms, soils, water bodies, climate,
  vegetation) in order to understand the
  interaction within and between ecosystems
• major socio-economic systems of the Earth
  (agriculture, settlement, transport, industry,
  trade, energy, population and others) in order to
  achieve a sense of place
• different ways of creating environments according
  to differing cultural values, religious beliefs,
  technical, economic and political systems. This
  helps facilitate understanding of the diversity
  of peoples and societies on Earth and the
  cultural richness of humanity

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• Other documents, like your own curriculum
  development material, talk about the important
  role of geography in cross-curriculum (and I
  would add life-long) values education.
• There is also a new importance attached to
  learner centered geographies that I find
  emerging in these documents.
• Some of these documents make direct links to new
  cultural geographies by using terms like
  perspectives.

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What are these new perspectives?

• Part of the problem with the concept of
  perspectives is that the word is used in a
  number of ways in different contexts. In teaching
  university geography, we are particularly
  interested in differentiating between different
  theoretical perspectives. That is, we want
  students to know about how knowledge about the
  world is organised and understood from different
  collective standpoints.
• We explore whether different ways of looking at
  things, thinking about things, talking about
  things and organising our understanding of things
  affects what we can know about things. In
  essence, if we have a different perspective, we
  may have different but equally true ways of
  interpreting our geographies. Maori geographies
  are a case in point.

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• Particular bodies of thought or sets of ideas
  provide us with perspectives, like
  post-modernism. These are not any one persons
  views but an aggregate of ideas that have been
  built up over decades.
• At some point, it is possible to see that a
  particular set of ideas tends to always take us
  in a particular direction,  build on the same
  foundational ideas and require us to think in
  particular kinds of ways.
• Once a knowledge framework has developed this
  kind of stature, we tend to talk about the
  framework as a theoretical perspective. Often
  we organise mind-sets into knowledge
  disciplines. This tendency is a characteristic
  of the  practice of western/European thought.
  We have created Maori Geographies the Maori
  belief system has always been there.

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Conclusions Future Geographies

• Learner centred education has driven new approach
  to the classroom
• On-going professional development for teachers is
  required

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Conclusions Future Geographies

• Given the distributed cohort of teachers, how do
  we achieve (and then maintain currency) in the
  professional development of teachers?
• In-service training is often not the same as
  professional development

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Conclusions Future Geographies

• We need to talk collectively about the
  profession as well as about the content areas
  and methodologies of our subject
• By implication, this requires both social and
  personal development of us as learners and
  teachers of Geography

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Conclusions Future Geographies

• We have ways of building communities of
  practice that enable us to share and debate our
  professional development.
• On-line professional development using platforms
  such as Blackboard are a significant new
  development in Geography education.

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Conclusions Future Geographies

• We need curriculum developers to work with
  curriculum deliverers in new cartographies and
  new cultural geographies to determine both what
  will be done (in service training) and how we can
  become better at doing it (professional
  development).
• New technologies spawn new ways of doing both.
  Internet communities of practice transform
  traditional teaching and learning approaches.