Chapter 8: Geography Education: Making Sense of Our World with Spatial Relationships

When children ask, “Are we there yet?” they are trying to make sense of where they are in time and space. Adults may not ask the same geographic question, but they do continue to organize their experiences into contexts of time and place and use that information to inform their interactions. Whether from a child’s innocent perspective or from a scholarly point of view, geography education is fundamentally about people and places in the global environment. Advances in technology and new understandings of spatial thinking combine with professional review of the field during the past two decades to provide geography educators with new tools for communicating the importance of geography in making sense of the world.