Geography in History: a Necessary Connection in teaching Social Studies
Geography and history are complementary subjects best taught together within the
social studies curriculum. It is part of the collected wisdom of teachers that one
cannot teach history without geography or geography without history. Both subjects
have been emphasized in high-profile curriculum reform reports produced by
various organizations, such as the Bradley Commission on History in Schools, the
Education for Democracy Project of the American Federation of Teachers, and the
National Commission on Social Studies in the Schools. But most social studies
teachers are primary teachers of history. They are ignoring an important part of
history because they do not include geography as part of the teaching repertoire.
The geographic perspective can enrich the study of history by helping students grasp
the significance of location, the inevitability of change, and the importance of human
perceptions at given times in the past. Helping students to become more informed
geographically means teaching better history.
Hypothesis
How should classroom instructors proceed to connect geography with history in the
curriculum. I believe that answering this question will involve three assumptions:
It is impossible to understand the present without understanding geography.
It is impossible to understand the present without understanding the past.
The Essay on Geographies of Social Difference
Map 1: [Figure 2, People not fluent in English as a percentage of the total population aged 5 years and over, Sydney, 2006] (a) Compare the spatial pattern of the map to the map of unemployment. Does the map share the same spatial pattern as unemployment (i.e. do the areas of high and low concentration match)? Describe the similarities and differences in the spatial pattern. Figure (1) displays ...
It is impossible to understand the past without understanding geography.
In other words, the rationale for history (studying the past to understand the
present) requires knowing geography: today’s geography and the geography of
different places at different times in the past.
Synopsis of Research
Bradley Commission-recognizes “the relationship between geography and
history as a matrix of time and place, and as context for events”.
Florida Commission on Social Studies Education published Connections,
Challenges, Choices which presents the objectives, subjects, topics, and rationale
for the state of Florida’s new social studies curriculum for grades K-12.
Geography and history are hightlighted as core subjects of the school curriculum
in Goal Three of a set of six National Education Goals proclaimed by the
President and the state governors in February 1990.
The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 years of American
History-stresses that “geography is not just a physical stage for the historical
drama, not just a set of facts about areas of the earth. It is a special way of
looking at the world. Geography, like history, is an age-old and essential strategy
for thinking about large and complex matters”.
Framework for the 1994 NAEP U.S. History Assessment-points out that “ history
is a spatial dimension-the places where human actions occur. for example,
aspects of the natural environment, such as climate and terrain, influence human
behavior; and people affect the places they inhabit. Therefore, main ideas of
geography, such as the location of places and relationships within places should
be included as important parts of the study of history”.
Geography for Life-presents a framework of four questions that focus on using
geography to interpret the past.
