Geography Awareness Week 2015
As the year wraps up, we should take a minute to recognize the students and faculty from the Geography Department who worked hard during this year’s Geography Awareness Week (Nov 16-20), sharing their enthusiasm, appreciation, and knowledge of Geography.
Geography Awareness Week is an annual celebration held during the third week in November to promote geographic literacy and education, organized by National Geographic Education Programs. Established by Presidential proclamation over 25 years ago, GAWeek is centered on events, policy advocacy, communication, volunteerism, and activities for students, families, and community members. This year’s theme, “Explore! The Power of Maps,” encouraged participants to use maps to develop spatial thinking skills and the awareness that these skills are necessary to understand geography, Earth and environmental sciences, and much more.
This year, UCSB saw an excellent turnout of volunteers, much to the delight of the department’s graduate student Visibility and Outreach Committee, which spearheads the recruiting effort each year. A total of 27 faculty and graduate students gave presentations to classes from kindergarten through high school. Twelve schools in Goleta and Santa Barbara participated, many for the second or third year in a row, and a total of 28 presentations were provided. One graduate student, Kitty Currier, even gave a presentation to a class of students in the village of Pejarakan in northwest Bali, Indonesia, where she is working as part of her research.
Presentations discussed a range of topics, with examples including global soils, water resources, drought, geography and history, sun-earth relations, polar bears of the arctic, oceans from space, and cartography. A few presenters pulled double (or even triple) duty, including a team of three graduate students — Sari Blakeley, Sarah Shivers, and Alana Ayasse — who provided a total of 5 presentations to 8th graders at Goleta Valley Junior High!
Graduate student Barbara Quimby gave an exciting presentation at La Cumbre Junior High school, where she talked about her field experiences at Samoa and Indonesia. Students were intrigued to find how different some cultures can be to our own while sharing many of the habits and interests of the modern globalized world, such as social media. One student was also surprised to hear that some cultures consider it “better and healthier” to “eat with your hands than using spoons, forks and knifes [sic].” The teacher was pleased with the presentation, noting that Barbara “spoke to the students at an academic level that was easily understood” and that “the application of [the] themes of geography in grad studies was a great real-life application which clarified student thinking.”
Kate Voss and Kelsey Bisson, both graduate students, found that the students and teachers at the Anacapa School had highly relevant questions. Kate Voss stated: “It was really exciting because clearly they understood what we were trying to communicate and then were able to process the information to ask critical questions about additional factors or future work!” They were even asked about how their education brought them to geography as a field.
Graduate students Nina Bingham and Michelle Oyewole gave two presentations to students from 4 classes at Brandon Elementary and El Montecito School. Nina recalled that “the kids were really excited; we showed them different soils from around the world and talked about what factors influenced the formation of those soils.” According to Michelle, the students were asked to discuss soils from the UCSB campus, Goleta, and Hawaii, and the general response was that the soils were cool and the students wanted to follow Michelle and Nina on Instagram. One of the teachers mirrored the students’ enthusiasm by noting that Michelle and Nina were “fun and passionate presenters.”
Another graduate student, Lumari Pardo-Rodriguez, gave an inspiring presentation about combining history and geography to a class at Dos Pueblos High School. Lumari experienced the enthusiasm of the students with delight: “I just love it. As soon as I put up maps they started talking like crazy and asking lots of questions. They were really surprised that you could use geography to understand history and why people settled in specific locations.”
From the youngest of students to those preparing for college, the level of engagement was impressive. Minquan Chen presented on remote sensing to his group of students, and one student raised his hand to name off several satellites he already knew about! The students in Sarah Lafia’s class were so happy with her presentation that they sent her thank you notes. Some students enthusiastically discussed population distribution maps, while others were asked questions about the presenters’ experiences. One presenter was asked about their fieldwork, and the teacher commented on how exciting it was to have an expert present to their class. Finally, of course, Tommy Dickey entertained his elementary students with his polar bear dog, and, as anyone can confirm, kids love polar bears and Great Pyrenées [see the November 24, 2015 article, “Dickey’s Delightful Doggies Define Departmental Dedication to Outreach”]!
Thanks to the hard work of all the volunteers, it was one of the most successful Geography Awareness Weeks to date.
Editor’s note: Article contributed by members of the Visibility and Outreach Committee: Nina Bingham, Sari Blakeley, Heather Frazier, Mike Johnson, Susan Meerdink, and Rafael Ramos, with special thanks to Heather for pulling it all together. To learn more about Geography Awareness Week, visit the National Geographic webpage.
