Designed for Understanding: Learning Progressions for Global Citizenship

“Students can find facts on the internet; we should focus on teaching skills.” This observation is common among educators today, but it is also naïve and dangerous. If students lack a framework of accurate and well-connected facts for comparison, it is hard to evaluate new facts for accuracy or relevance. The key word in that sentence is framework. A new observation or internet “fact” might obviously support or contradict another fact in memory, but the real test is how it fits into a larger body of accepted knowledge. This seemingly abstract discussion has gained new urgency as the internet makes all kinds of “facts” easier to access. In this session, a short presentation and handouts will review 21^st-century research on the neural processes of perceiving, processing, and remembering spatial information—the specific category of facts that matter when analyzing any issue that has a geographic component, from agriculture, biodiversity, climate change, and disease to sustainability, tariffs, terrorism, and voting. Session participants then examine some ongoing efforts to develop internet-based presentations, readings, and age-appropriate student activities that engage students, target the brain networks that process spatial information, and help build a scaffold for further inquiry. The centerpiece of this scaffold is a set of interactive maps, which allow users to turn individual layers of information on or off. This website allows easy comparison of memorable maps that are carefully curated to provide background about latitude, resources, population density, cultural diversity, and several other ideas that are causally important around the world. The goal is to build a framework of fundamental geographic facts that can help students (and citizens) interpret information from other internet sites, especially those that promise to provide “a satellite image, ground-level view, and/or census information about any place on earth.”