GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION

The entire population of  Heimdal, North Dakota has been evacuated Wednesday morning after a train carrying crude oil derailed and exploded. A BNSF Railway oil train derailed around 7:30 am, setting at least 10 oil tanker cars on fire. The Bismarck Tribune spoke with emergency responders who “said the the sky was black with smoke near the derailment site.”

Source: www.commondreams.org

Jamaal Allan is a high school teacher in Des Moines, Iowa. People make assumptions based on his name alone, and that’s taken him on a lifelong odyssey of racial encounters.

Source: www.npr.org

“London completely dominates the political, cultural and economic life of the U.K. to an extent rarely seen elsewhere. That imbalance has been an issue in the run-up to Thursday’s election.”

The problems with primate cities are hardly unique to London (see here resources for teaching about primate cities using the example of Mexico City).  The lack of a balanced urban hierarchy that we would see in countries where the rank-size rule applies is a political problem as stated in this NPR podcast.  This additional BBC article bemoans Britain’s lack of a true second city, arguing that London’s shadow looms too large for sustained national development outside of the primate city. 

Tags: APHG, urban,  unit 7 cities, megacities.

“A decades-old effort found that moving poor families to better neighborhoods did little to help them.  A large new study is about to overturn the findings of Moving to Opportunity. Based on the earnings records of millions of families that moved with children, it finds that poor children who grow up in some cities and towns have sharply better odds of escaping poverty than similar poor children elsewhere.”

Tags: housing, economic, poverty, place, socioeconomic, neighborhood.

Source: www.nytimes.com

“When a terrible earthquake hit Nepal on April 25, our correspondents quickly began to report from the battered capital, Katmandu. By the beginning of this week, we were still reporting on the quake’s aftermath, but under a slightly different dateline: Kathmandu.  Why the switch?

There are many examples of foreign place names with more than one English rendering, especially if the local language uses a different alphabet, requiring the name to be transliterated for English. For Nepal’s capital, the ‘Katmandu’ spelling has long been widely used in English-language publications, and may still be more familiar to some American readers. But ‘Kathmandu,’ with an ‘h’ in the middle, has become more widespread in recent years, reflecting the preferred local usage.”

Tags: place, language, toponyms, Nepal.

Source: www.nytimes.com

“In 2013, China replaced Mexico as the top sending country for immigrants to the United States. This followed a decade where immigration from China and India increased while immigration from Mexico decreased.”

Source: researchmatters.blogs.census.gov

While the Wall Street Journal is declaring this news, it is nothing new to the Census Bureau and those that look at the data rather than listen to the news media.  Some in the media would have you imagine that there is a flood of Mexican migrants entering the United States when the recent history shows that narrative simply doesn’t line up with data.  Would you have guessed that both India and China were sending more migrants to the U.S. than Mexico?  This is one of those examples where our preconceived notions interfere with actually ‘getting it right.’  This is why Hans Rosling started the Ignorance Project.  

Tags: Mexico, migration.

The It Was Never a Dress campaign is not only taking social media by storm, it is also changing the way we view the traditional women’s bathroom sign. We see that the men’s figure wears pants and the women’s symbol wears a dress, but what if it was never meant to be a dress in the first place?  Tania Katan launched the popular #ItWasNeverADress campaign at last week’s ‘Girls in Tech‘ conference with the idea that the female figure is instead wearing a cape, asserting that women can be superheroes or anything else they choose to be.”

Source: www.mymodernmet.com

These restroom signs are so ubiquitous that we might fail to realize how they are a part of the gendered landscape in which we live.  This takes that well-known icon that was designed to generically represents women and makes us see the sign (and women maybe?) in a new light.  It’s delightfully playful and yet powerfully subversive; it challenges us to see beyond what we’ve been told to see and what society tells us what we should see.  The designers called this “an invitation to shift perceptions and assumptions about women and the audacious, sensitive, and powerful gestures they make every single day.”

Questions to Ponder: what other elements of the cultural landscape convey gendered messages? What impact do these message have? 

Tags: perspective, cultural norms, culture, gender, popular culture.

Stratfor explains Romania’s geographic challenge of remaining united while limiting the influence of larger surrounding powers. For more of these videos, visit http://arcg.is/1IeK3dT

Source: www.youtube.com

Stratfor produced a new video in their “Geographic Challenge” series.  I’ve updated my map which spatially indexes 70+ of their videos that are especially relevant to geography teachers.  These videos are great starting points for students that are researching a particular country.

Tags: Romania, mapping, video, geography education, geopolitics, political.