Geography and education: North America

Abstract

The subfield of geographic education stands at the intersection of geography and education. This report discusses recent developments in geographic education in North America. Geographic educators specialize in the communication of geographic knowledge and skills and of subjective perspectives such as attitudes and values. As such, all geographers (and many nongeographers) are geographic educators, yet few North American geographers categorize themselves as geographic educators and even fewer count geographic education as one of their specialties. The Association of American Geographers (AAG) has 40 specialty groups, and the speciality group on geography in higher education has 206 members, which is less than 5 % of the total AAG membership of 4462 (Association of American Geographers, 1989a; 1989b). The National Council for Geographic Education (NCGE) has about 1400 members, about half of whom are on college or university faculties. Although a small subfield, the topic ’Geography in education ’ is included in the AAG’s Geographical bibliography for American libraries (Stoltman, 1985). Canada has no nationwide organization