Week promotes geography awareness among kids

University of North Alabama - Lisa Keys-Matthews is passionate about teaching geography.

As an assistant geography professor at the University of North Alabama, she gets the opportunity to share that passion almost every day with her students, but Keys-Matthews said more could be done to generate an interest in geography at the primary and high school levels.

It's one reason she and some of her students participate each year in National Geography Awareness Week, which will be from Nov. 16-20. It's also why she said she would like to see the state adopt a more geography-friendly curriculum to help kids foster a love of the world and cultures before coming to the university.

"The importance of geography in today's environment is an overstated cliche, but it's true. The world has gotten smaller," Keys-Matthews said. "If we don't teach our kids to think geographically and think about the greater world and our part in this closed system, which means we're not likely to get off this planet in our lifetimes, then we never learn that what we do with our resources has the possibility to affect the entire world at some point."

For children as young as kindergarten, this can be a revelation, she said.

Since Congress proclaimed the third week of November as National Geography Awareness Week, staff and students from UNA have visited area classrooms teaching students what it means to be geographically aware. In 2008, Keys-Matthews said more than 40 classrooms were visited throughout the week.

This year's theme is the European continent.

"It's a good experience for the college students because this is public service and a service-learning project," she said. "It's good for the elementary school students to see the college kids working like this."

UNA senior geography major April Strait has participated each year in the event.

"It's important for kids not only to know about their surroundings, like where they live, but the world as a whole," she said. "Kids have the basic know-how of certain areas; we just enhance that, and it is fun to see them get excited."

Keys-Matthews said the UNA students will be divided into groups of five or six and have planned activities to take to the classrooms, which will be appropriate to the grade level. Second-graders might learn about longitude and latitude, for instance, while sixth-graders might get a lesson in why tourism dollars are so important to the Eurpoean economy.

"We have around 138 declared majors in the program now, and that's an all-time high for us," she said. "Students get jobs when they graduate, even in this economy, but beyond that, it just makes good business sense to really understand geography."

Keys-Matthews points to the

$16.3 billion Alabama made in exports to more than 188 foreign countries in 2007 as a reason to see more importance placed on geography at the K-12 level.

"It's required in the seventh grade for just one semester," she said.

The Alabama Department of Secondary Education is considering a new course of study that would revise how geography is taught once students get to the high school level.

Malissa Valdes, spokeswoman for the department, said the change, if adopted in February, would mean modern world history and geography would be taught during the senior year, which would shift the current course in government and economics to the junior year.

"Geography is a valued part of the social studies curriculum," she said, adding that the new course will be implemented in 2011.

Michelle Rupe Eubanks can be reached at 740-5745 or michelle.eubanks@TimesDaily.com.