Friday, May 24, 2013

What is Geographic Reasoning?

This is an excellent column by Daniel Edelson (VP for Education at the National Geographic Society) in ArcNews (Spring 2013).

Our challenge as geographers is always the same: nobody understands what modern geography actually is...which makes it really difficult to convince them that we need more and better geography education. in some point during the conversation we usually throw-out the term geographic reasoning...that generally fails because we cannot define without circular reasoning...now what?

Edelson suggests the core components of geographic reasoning (and I modified slightly):
  1. Measuring and mapping geographic distributions (= where is stuff?)
  2. Identifying patterns and clusters (= stuff usually does not occur randomly on Earth!)
  3. Identifying paths and flows (= think roads and traffic!)
  4. Analyze these geographic relationships (over time, if applicable)  

No comments:

Post a Comment