GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION

In India, one of the most significant festivals is Diwali, or the Festival of Lights. It’s a five-day celebration that includes good food, fireworks, colored sand, and special candles and lamps.

Source: video.nationalgeographic.com

This 3 minute video from National Geographic is a nice introduction to the cultural practices of Diwali, the fall festival which symbolizes the triumph of light over darkness.  With some analogies to Christmas for Christians, Diwali is also perceived by some to be overly commercialized in recent years.  

Tags: religion, South Asia, culture, Hinduism.

“From 1936 to 1966, the ‘Green Book’ was a travel guide that provided black motorists with peace of mind while they drove through a country where racial segregation was the norm and sundown towns — where African-Americans had to leave after dark — were not uncommon.”

Source: www.dnainfo.com

The effects of globalization and technologies are uneven; this is a very clear example of how mobility and access to other places can be limited based on various segments of the population. It is repugnant to think that such a book was ever necessary in this country, but it is heartening to see the evidence of an organized network that worked to lessen the pain of those oppressed by it.    

This year’s Geography Awareness Week‘s theme is “Explore! The Power of Maps.”  Geographer Derek Alderman complied these resources for teachers wanting to use the example of the Green Book in their classrooms.  

Tags: mobility, transportation, race, class, culture, historical, USA, ethnicity.

“In Northeast India just north of Bangladesh is the province of Meghalaya.”

Source: www.youtube.com

“The National Council for Geographic Education (NCGE) continues to both promote and celebrate geographic teaching and learning. Our activities include conducting and gathering research, producing journals and other geography publications, developing curricular resources at the K-12 and University levels, providing professional development opportunities, and organizing an annual conference.”

Source: www.ncge.org

The NCGE promotes geographic education, which we need now more than ever–here are the labor statistics about the future need for geographers supporting the statements in the image above. 

Tags: NCGE, geography education, labor.

“Dear Subway, I really wish you would have talked to a farmer. I really wish you would have done so before your big announcement saying you would, as of 2016, be sourcing all of your turkey and chicken as being raised without antibiotics.”

Source: hewittfarmsinc.wordpress.com

This is not a typical source, but it captures an important perspective on our food production systems.  Some policies (like this one from Subway) are designed to increase customer confidence in the quality of the product, but they don’t reflect some of the practical issues that farmers have to face on the farm.  

Tags: food, economic, food production, agribusiness.

When you learned about The Periodic Table of Elements in high school, it probably didn’t look like this. Above, we have a different way of visualizing the elements. Created by Professor William F. Sheehan at Santa Clara University in 1970, this chart takes the elements (usually shown like this) and scales them relative to their abundance on the Earth’s surface.

Source: www.openculture.com

The Periodic Table of Elements shows each element as a box, but that doesn’t help us understand which elements are the most scarce and abundant.  The “rare earths” are crucial ingredients in cell phones, laptops and magnets that create clean energy; China controls 95% of the rare earths production and are no longer exporting these materials to other countries (some consider the availability of rare earths a risk to U.S. national security). 

Tags:  pollution, industry, economic, energy, resources, environment, environment modify, sustainability.

“The curriculum ‘Empire, Republic, Democracy: A History of Turkey’ traces the final years of the Ottoman Empire, the birth of the Turkish Republic, and contemporary issues in Turkey. Learn more at www.choices.edu/turkey “

Source: vimeo.com

This video is a great introduction to the Choices Program’s new unit on Turkey…a country that is truly a bridge between the Middle East and Europe, without being fully in either.   This unique global position makes Turkey a very important country to understand both culturally and politically.

Tags: political, culture, Turkey, historical.

In a study of seven world metros, only a little more than a quarter of the streets were named for women.

Tags: gender, mapping, urban, toponyms.

Source: www.citylab.com