Good Morning Geography Community –
Many thanks to those of you who attended the pre-conference social hosted by the Tennessee Geographic Alliance at Iron Hill Brewing, came by and visited with us at the Community Showcase and, especially, thank you to those who participated in the formal business meeting on Saturday. Following are some notes from the meeting that I condensed from the lively and thought-provoking discussions.
I encourage you to fill out the post-conference survey that was sent out by NCSS. As I recall from the meeting, two comments that were almost unanimously agreed upon were, 1) a better job could be done in physically grouping like-themed sessions in the same area of the conference space to minimize distance and time between sessions and 2) Improve the effectiveness of the search algorithm within the conference app.
We hope to have a more active and visible role in the Nashville Conference in 2023. Please encourage your peers to join the Community and please SHARE BEST PRACTICES and OPPORTUNITIES FOR TEACHERS on the Community chat board.
Best wishes for a wonderful holiday season.
Kurt Butefish
Tennessee Geographic Alliance
kbutefis@utk.edu
GEOGRAPHY COMMUNITY MEETING NOTES:
What do you want from a NCSS Conference and the Geography Community?
- Embrace cross cutting disciplinary themes and highlight methods stiving for educational equity.
- Contribute to the visibility of geography as a discipline within NCSS.
- Provide tools for teachers to more clearly define for their students, what is geography.
Aspirational goals for Nashville:
- Encourage poster sessions. They lend themselves well to geography content.
- Timely geography keynotes – For example, you can't understand what is happening in Ukraine unless you have a geographic perspective.
- Have topical themed sessions, i.e. LGBTQ, indigenous.
- Consider roundtable structured sessions like those in the International Community.
- Recruit more geography sessions for elementary teachers.
Longer term aspirational goals:
- Define what geography is for our students.
- Establish a dedicated geography strand of breakouts at NCSS conference.
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Kurt Butefish
Coordinator
Tennessee Geographic Alliance
Powell TN
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