Topic 2: Why Physical Geography for Teachers?

Reason 1:Physical geography sets the stage

for human activities on Earth

Lake effect snows

Thick Fog in West London

Nile River flooding in August of 2001 at Khartoum, Sudan

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

Conditions allowing Arizona’s Growth

Giant drainage basin of the Salt River Project

Reason 2:There is value in understanding

nature for its own sake.

Your doodler could be the next Frank Lloyd Wright, integrating nature, art and architecture.

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

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

Reason 3:Physical processes impact our daily

lives and create natural hazards

Just consider Arizona Heat .. The first 100 degree day at Sky Harbor Airport …

1938 + Today

Salt River Flood in 1993

Reason 4:Physical geography is a core player in solving environmental problems

Analyzing Effects of Fire

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

GIS &GISCorps

Talbot Brooks & Hurricane Katrina

Talbot Brooks: Example of analyzing the Storm Surge of Hurricane Katrina,

using landforms, knowledge of climatology, and human occupation to help identify hotspot problems

Reason 5:Physical 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

Physical Geography is a core Part of K-12 Geography Promotions in the USA and UK (see these in the Classroom

Resources Folder)

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.

Hargreaves&Earl (1990) Rights of passage: Review of selected research about schooling in the transition years.

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 altogether…shaping 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)

Reason 6:Physical geography helps you answer all those questions…

How did the Grand Canyon form?

Reason 7:Physical geography is a core part

of the discipline of geography

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.