Topic 2: Why Physical Geography for Teachers?

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Topic 2 Why Physical Geography for Teachers?
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Reason 1Physical geography sets the stage for
human activities on Earth

• Lake effect snows

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• Thick Fog in West London

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• Nile River flooding in August of 2001 at
  Khartoum, Sudan

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• Delaware water gap its role in Indigenous
  peoples, French Indian War, railroads, and now
  outdoor recreation.

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• Conditions allowing Arizonas Growth

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• Giant drainage basin of the Salt River Project

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Reason 2There is value in understanding nature
for its own sake.
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• Your doodler could be the next Frank Lloyd
  Wright, integrating nature, art and architecture.

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• Your daydreamer could come up with a new solution
  to the global ozone layer crisis.

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• Education about the natural world enriches the
  lives of your students and helps them succeed.

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Reason 3Physical processes impact our daily
lives and create natural hazards
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• Just consider Arizona Heat .. The first 100
  degree day at Sky Harbor Airport

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• 1938 Today

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• Salt River Flood in 1993

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Reason 4Physical geography is a core player in
solving environmental problems
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Analyzing Effects of Fire

• From Geography Ph.D. student Jinsoo Park,
  University of ARizona

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GIS GISCorps
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• Talbot Brooks Hurricane Katrina

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• Talbot Brooks Example of analyzing the Storm
  Surge of Hurricane Katrina, using landforms,
  knowledge of climatology, and human occupation
  to help identify hotspot problems

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Reason 5Physical geography links 2 major parts
of our K-12 curriculum social studies (human
geography) and science (physical geography)
helping kids and us all to understand that the
subjects we teach do not exist in isolation
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Physical Geography is a core Part of K-12
Geography Promotions in the USA and UK (see
these in the Classroom Resources Folder)
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Identified Problem

• Secondary schools are deeply entrenched in an
  academic orientation that is perpetuated by a
  large number of beliefs and traditions that make
  this academic orientation among the most powerful
  of the sacred norms of secondary schooling.
  This pervasive academic orientation creates a
  curriculum that is unbalanced, is content-driven,
  has limited relevance for many students, and
  results in fragmentation of student experience
  and balkanization of secondary schools and their
  departments.

HargreavesEarl (1990) Rights of passage Review
of selected research about schooling in the
transition years.
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Suggested Solution

• A pragmatic approach to curriculum
  integration embraces the established disciplines
  and does not attempt to ignore them but
  attempts to meet the needs of pupils, the school
  and the local community... by reshaping and
  re-establishing subjects, rather than eroding
  them away altogethershaping of the subject in
  ways that make it more relevant, more interesting
  and, dare we suggest, more integrated with the
  ways in which pupils structure their knowledge.

Grady J. Venville, John Wallace, Léonie J. Rennie
John A. Malone Curriculum Integration (2001)
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Reason 6Physical geography helps you answer all
those questions
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How did the Grand Canyon form?
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Reason 7Physical geography is a core part of
the discipline of geography
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• Imagery seen in this presentation is courtesy
  of Ron Dorn and other ASU colleagues, students
  and colleagues in other geography departments,
  individual illustrations in scholarly journals
  such as Science and Nature, scholarly societies
  such as the Association of American Geographers,
  city, state governments, other countries
  government websites and U.S. government agencies
  such as NASA, USGS, NRCS, Library of Congress,
  U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service USAID and NOAA.