Recently in For Young Adults Category

My roommate, another National Geographic Education staffer, first introduced me to the Geography Collective about a year ago. An artist who does a good deal of graphic design work for our group, she was enamored with the playful design of the website. We both fell in love with the Collective's revolutionary approach to engaging kids in real-world learning through "guerrilla geography," and pledged that if we ever decided to pick up and move to the U.K., we'd see if we could join them.

You can imagine my excitement when Daniel Raven-Ellison, a member of the Collective, contacted me a few months later to see how we might collaborate "across the pond" on our respective geography campaigns. He was in the process of releasing a new book called Mission:Explore, a geography "training manual" with 102 missions challenging kids to (re)discover our world, and was looking for opportunities to spread the word. I couldn't think of a better forum than the blog!

Read on for more about Mission:Explore and the Geography Collective, and stay tuned for future collaborative projects with National Geographic Education. Next Mission: Geography Awareness Week. Daniel and I are working on a series of freshwater missions (I might even become an honorary member of the Collective)!

Endangered Geographies
Now is a very exciting and rich time to be a geographer. Opportunities for us as professionals and as a field of study are developing at lightening speed. We  have a better knowledge and are more equipped than ever to understand a wide range of social, economic, and environmental issues empowering humanity as never before. Yet, in my view, there are many ways in which the potential of geography is under threat.

In this blog post I am going to outline five of these threats.

Threat 1 - Children's Physical Geographies

Read the August 2010 Newsletter: "Inspire students to take action this year!"

INSIDE:
Editor's Pick: Special Guest Blogger Elisabeth Soep talks about her inspiring new book,
Drop That Knowledge: Youth Radio Stories.

August Challenge: Plan a service-learning project
GeoFeature: 4-H2O: National Youth Science Day
GeoNews: U.N. declares "International Year of Youth"
Blog: A Kid, a Campaign, Iceland

"...Young people can use media to learn about places close to home and far away. The connections they form seem to shrink the physical distance that separates citizens around the world, even as they can reveal disparate experiences and inequalities that young reporters examine through their media stories."










We've all heard the stories of major news organizations struggling in the digital age of new media. If there's a silver lining to the decline of the media behemoths, it's the emergence of more opportunities for diverse perspectives in reporting. For more than 15 years, Youth Radio has been helping under-served young people develop strong leadership, journalism, and media production skills. The National Geographic Education Foundation has supported Youth Radio's work fostering story-telling and civic engagement around local and global issues through grant contributions to the organization. Now, we are excited to join Youth Radio in celebrating the release of a new book about the success of their empowering, educational programs.

There's nothing like a newsroom to make the world feel big and small at the same time. Put young people in charge, and the effect can be even more extreme. At Youth Radio, a Peabody Award-winning, youth-driven production company headquartered in Oakland, California, young people produce stories distributed through global broadcast and digital outlets including National Public Radio, The Huffington Post, iTunes, and YouTube. At a single editorial meeting at Youth Radio, young people and their adult producers might pitch stories on the effects of budget cuts inside local Oakland schools, young soldiers returning from the Iraq war, healthcare reform in a rural Kentucky town, and the transnational Korean musical genre known as K-POP. Inside these freewheeling discussions are recurring teachable moments through which young people can use media to learn about places close to home and far away. The connections they form seem to shrink the physical distance that separates citizens around the world, even as they can reveal disparate experiences and inequalities that young reporters examine through their media stories.

In my new book, Drop That Knowledge: Youth Radio Stories, Vivian Chávez and I take readers behind the scenes at Youth Radio, inside meetings and stories like the ones I've just described. In each chapter, we present a series of Youth Radio media features, detail the negotiations and inquiries that supported their production, and then highlight implications for learning, teaching, journalism, and media justice efforts.

The virtues enshrined in the Boy Scout Law--trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, reverent--date back more than a century to founder Lord Robert Baden-Powell's original manual, Scouting for Boys.
 

Fine attributes, to be sure, but they beg one important question: Where's the geo??? To scout about, after all, a boy scout needs to know how to read or make a map, what's where, and how to get there.

So National Geographic Education pitched its tents, two big ones ... 


 

... at the National Centennial Boy Scout Jamboree near Fredericksburg, Virginia a few weeks ago and invited the assembled teens to view the world through our lens. More than 20,000 stopped by and did just that.

In case you aren't a boy or a scout or otherwise couldn't make it, here are a few highlights of what we shared:

IT DOESN'T JUST GROW ON TREES

 Well, some of what we eat does, but most of us rarely see our food get grown or raised. Often, we don't even know where it comes from. We gave scouts photos of familiar fruits, veggies, nuts, and meats and asked them to find the countries that export them most on a giant map of the world.
 

THE PLANET THROUGH ANIMAL EYES

Animals may share the Earth with us, but their worldview's entirely different. That's why National Geographic's remote imaging team developed Crittercam...



... a suite of high-tech, industrial-strength cameras that strap or stick to animals, then pop off for retrieval and a bona fide creature's-eye look at the landscape. Here, intrepid intern Matt sports Crittercam's ever-popular "KidCam."

ABOUT THE SURVEY:
National Geographic and international polling firm GlobeScan recently released the results of the third annual Greendex survey.   The Greendex is a quantitative study of 17,000 consumers in 17 countries.  Participants were asked questions about their energy use, consumer product use, transportation practices, beliefs about the environment and sustainability, and knowledge of environmental issues.  The answers were then calculated to churn out a Greendex score--the relative environmental impact of a person's consumer choices.  Individual scores are averaged to create a mean score for each country.  The Greendex measures the impact of the average consumer in each country surveyed; it does not measure the environmental impact of a total country.


Here are some of the results:

Two months after the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico began gushing, the scale of the disaster has only increased.  Sometimes scale can be difficult to visualize from news stories, but these oil spill visualization tools can help!

Parents: Talk with your kids about how the size of the spill compares to geographic areas they might be familiar with (e.g. your county, the size of the national park you visited on vacation last year, etc.)

Teachers: Have students try to identify land areas that might be the same size as the oil spill (e.g. small U.S. states, islands, and European countries), and then crunch the numbers to see how their guesses measure up.

Thursday, June 10th, ethnic violence broke out in the southern city of Osh in Kyrgyzstan.  Shortly after, American newspapers and news channels began covering the story.


For many of us, Kyrgyzstan isn't a country we hear about often. We're likely unsure of what language Kyrgyzstanis speak, what type of government they have, how big the country is, where it is located, and even how to pronounce or spell "Kyrgyzstan." 

Without context, stories of violence in Kyrgyzstan on news programs and in newspapers are nothing more than stories, confined to a 2D non-reality.







Courtesy New York Times

Fifty-six days after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, with hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil continuing to spill into the Gulf of Mexico, more exploratory, off-shore drilling is still scheduled to commence July 1st in the Arctic. 

According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Shell is scheduled to begin drilling in Alaska this July.  The proposed drill sites are in areas noted for extreme storms, strong winds, moving sea ice, and subzero temperatures.  These conditions would make it very difficult--if not impossible--for a successful response in the case of an oil spill. 

It has been more than a month since the April 20th Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, leading to an oil spill that, according to the Guardian, has already dumped 42-100 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.  Since then, the news has been filled with stories about skimming, tubes, domes, Top-Kill, cut and cap plans, and economic and environmental degradation. 


Public beaches were closed Friday in Grand Isle, La., as oil, dead fish, and birds washed ashore.

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/05/25/us/jp-SPILL-1.html

The massive impact of this disaster is difficult to wrap our minds around, and yet it is increasingly important that we try to do so.  This disaster is not an abstract story in the news.  It is a tragic misfortune that affects people, economic chains, ecosystems, and the planet.  Most importantly, it is preventable. 

In permit applications to drill in the Gulf, BP said that it was, "prepared to handle an oil spill more than ten times larger than the one now spewing crude," according to reports from Alison Fitzgerald of Bloomberg News.  Bob Deans, spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, categorized BP's actions as, "overpromised and underdelivered.  They told us they had a plan that could deal with the consequences of a worst-case scenario. They don't."

Even though the worst case scenario detailed in BP's disaster plan was far worse than the Deepwater Horizon spill, this spill is a worst case scenario for the local economy and environment.

The Oil Spill and the Economy

National Geographic just announced its new class of Emerging Explorers yesterday.



Fourteen visionary, young trailblazers from around the world -- including an electrical engineer, a musician, a bioarchaeologist, a mobile technology innovator and a herpetologist -- are among the 2010 awardees.

"National Geographic's mission is to inspire people to care about the planet, and our Emerging Explorers are outstanding young leaders whose endeavors further this mission. We are pleased to support them as they set out on promising careers. They represent tomorrow's Edmund Hillarys, Jacques Cousteaus and Dian Fosseys," said Terry Garcia, National Geographic's executive vice president for Mission Programs.

We in Education, a part of the "Missions Programs" branch that encompasses non-profit work in research, exploration, conservation, public programs, education, and grantmaking, are just as thrilled as EVP Terry Garcia about the addition of these leading-edge innovators to our family. We hope to work with many of them in our educational outreach over the coming years, so stay tuned for news on upcoming projects!

More on the 2010 Explorers: