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The Texas Alliance was established in 1986 under the joint leadership of Richard G. Boehm of Texas State University-San Marcos and James B. Kracht of Texas A&M University. Sarah W. Bednarz of Texas A&M replaced Kracht in 1987. Presently
the Texas Alliance has over 6,500 members, including teachers, university professors, parents, and community leaders,
who share the common goal of strengthening geographic education in Texas.
The Texas Alliance hosts workshops and conferences several times throughout the year in different locations
across the state. These workshops blend classroom application with geographic content in order to both
"educate the educators" as well as provide them with innovative, tested lesson plans. The Alliance's most important contribution is the sponsorship of summer institutes for teacher training in geographic education.
Since the early 1980's, numerous tests and surveys have revealed that people in the United States know very little geography, certainly less than our counterparts in Europe, Japan, Canada, and Russia. In fact, many young people today cannot locate important places on a map such as Japan and Iraq.
Business leaders, politicians, and educators recognize that geographic illiteracy is a threat to our economic, environmental, and political survival. The United States will not be able to maintain its position of world leadership without a knowledge of the crucial role that geography plays in understanding the cultures and countries of the world. Without geography our children
will no be ready to enter a globalizing society.
| 1. | To understand basic physical systems
that affect everyday life (e.g. earth-sun relationships, water cycle, wind and
ocean currents) |
| 2. | To learn the locations of places and
the physical and cultural characteristics of those places in order to function
more effectively in our increasingly interdependent world |
| 3. | To develop a mental map of your
community, state, country and the world so that you can understand the "where"
of places and events |
| 4. | To understand the geography of past
times and how geography has played important roles in the evolution of people,
ideas, places, and environments |
| 5. | To explain how the processes of human
and physical systems have arranged and sometimes changed the surface of the
Earth |
| 6. | To understand the spatial
organization of society and see order in what often appears to be random
scattering of people and places |
| 7. | To recognize spatial distributions at
all scales-local to worldwide-in order to understand the complex connectivity of
people and places |
| 8. | To be able to make sensible judgments
about matters involving relationships between the physical environment and
society |
| 9. | To appreciate Earth as the home of
humankind and provide insight for wise management decisions about how the
planet's resources should be used |
| 10. | To understand global interdependence
and to become a better global citizen |
| 1986 | First All-Texas
Conference is held |
| 1988 | First Geography Action!
Poster Contest is held |
| 1991 | A leadership institute developed
the Young Geographers Alliance, a program to develop geography clubs in grades
3-12 in Texas schools |
| 1991 | Uplift Geography, an urban
initiative, began. Workshops for city teachers have affected some 9,200 students
in San Antonio, most of whom are below poverty level |
| 1991-92 | A grant from the U.S. Department
of Education allowed The Alliance to conduct a special academy. Forty teachers
studied the state's geography curriculum at the academy and participated in an
intensive 12-month follow-up study of changes in the quality and quantity of
geography in Texas school curricula |
| 1998 | Geography and Assessment: Tools to
Improve the Quality of Geographic Education was centered on the topic of
performance-based assessments. Participants reevaluated their understanding of
assessment and accountability, and how these terms are interactive components of
the qualitative learning process |
| 2000 | The summer teacher training
institute, Big issues and Problem Solving, is held |
| 2001 | The Texas Alliance hosts the first
Summer Academy for Minority Scholars, which is an annual in-residence workshop
for high school students and their teachers developed to introduce participants
to various aspects of the field of geography, including education and career
paths |
| 2001 | The summer teacher training,
Spanning the Globe, focused on geographic skills and community-based problem
solving |
| 2001 | Sustaining Our State implemented
elements of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills and the National Geographic
Standards related to resources and environment-society relationships |
| 2003 | Field and Stream: Using Public
Lands as a Laboratory gave students and teachers the opportunity to study water
resources and sustainability outside of the classroom |
| 2004 | The Best of Both Worlds: Blending
History and Geography in the K-12 Curriculum, an in-residence workshop, resulted
in the development of joint U.S. History/Geography curriculum, containing lesson
plans produced by workshop participants |
| 2006 | Integrating Geo-Technologies into
Social Studies and Science Classrooms focused on developing skills and
strategies for integrating free or inexpensive and user-friendly
geo-technologies into teaching and learning in 6th-12th grade Social Studies and
Science classrooms |
| 2006 | Summer Leadership Academy was
designed for veteran teachers and focused on topics such as promoting geographic
literacy in Texas, mentoring novice teachers, and organizing quality in-service
workshops |
| 2006 | Geography 101: Best Practices for
Novice Classroom Teachers was geared towards pre-service and novice teachers and
included such topics as effective classroom teaching practices, geography lesson
plans, and how to engage students in geography learning |
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