Chapter 15: Diving In: Preparing Teachers to Implement Geospatial Technologies in the K–12 Classroom

The Geographic Alliance network began in 1986 as part of an effort by National Geographic Society to build grassroots organizations of classroom teachers and academic geographers joined together in an effort to promote and support géographie literacy in the K-12 classroom. Each state was encouraged to establish such an alliance and the National Geographic Society provided much of the original funding. One of the primary concerns in establishing these alliances was the fact that many classroom teachers were not trained in geography and “teachers teach what they know” (Douglas, 1999). State Geographic Alliances were charged with the task of first teaching the teachers the geographic content; those teachers would, in turn, teach their peers and their students. This system was couched in the goal of empowering teachers—empowered to be an instructional leader among their peers and to be an effective teacher of geographic content to whatever grade level they taught.