Developing Standards-Based Geography Curricular Materials from Overseas Field Experiences for K–12 Teachers

Abstract

Overseas experiences provide educators with exceptional opportunities to incorporate field study, firsthand experiences, and tangible artifacts into the classroom. Despite this potential, teachers must consider curricular standards that direct how such international endeavors can be integrated. Furthermore, geography curriculum development is more relevant when teachers link tangible local processes and events with those occurring in distant world regions. As such, this article demonstrates how a structured international field experience for K–12 educators incorporated geography curricular standards, and population geography as a common theme, to develop widely transferable curricular materials that advance students’ understanding of Chile and Latin American area studies.

Key Words:

• curriculum
• teacher education
• standards
• regional geography
• population geography

Acknowledgments

We thank the U.S. Department of Education’s Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad Program for funding this project. The contents of this article were developed under a grant from the Fulbright-Hays GPA, U.S. Department of Education. However, these contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the federal government. We thank Dr. Kay Weller for her critical role as the project’s curriculum specialist and for the organizational/conceptual framework that she contributed through her expertise as project director for previous Fulbright Hays GPA projects. We thank Hillery Oberle for drafting the map in Figure 1. Dr. Araya is grateful for the support of a grant from FONDECYT (#11110068), the Chilean national fund for scientific and technological development. We especially thank our Chilean geographer colleagues and university partners at Universidad de La Serena, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and Universidad de Tarapacá. Without their goodwill, support, enthusiasm, and expertise this project would not have been possible.

Notes

1. The project personnel also specifically selected Chile because of a longstanding student exchange program between the home university and one of the Chilean host universities and because of the project director’s expertise in Chile and Latin America in general.

2. There are programs that do offer support for international programs and are specifically for K–12 educators. Examples of these include the U.S. Department of Education’s Binational Migrant Education Initiative, which promotes teacher exchanges between the United States and Mexico, the Japan-United StatesTeacher Exchange Program, and field study programs to East Asian countries through the National Consortium for Teaching About Asia.

3. The Iowa Core Curriculum has recently been renamed to the Iowa Core.