My roommate, another National Geographic Education staffer, first introduced me to the Geography Collective about a year ago. An artist who does a good deal of graphic design work for our group, she was enamored with the playful design of the website. We both fell in love with the Collective’s revolutionary approach to engaging kids in real-world learning through “guerrilla geography,” and pledged that if we ever decided to pick up and move to the U.K., we’d see if we could join them.

You can imagine my excitement when Daniel Raven-Ellison, a member of the Collective, contacted me a few months later to see how we might collaborate “across the pond” on our respective geography campaigns. He was in the process of releasing a new book called Mission:Explore, a geography “training manual” with 102 missions challenging kids to (re)discover our world, and was looking for opportunities to spread the word. I couldn’t think of a better forum than the blog!

Read on for more about Mission:Explore and the Geography Collective, and stay tuned for future collaborative projects with National Geographic Education. Next Mission: Geography Awareness Week. Daniel and I are working on a series of freshwater missions (I might even become an honorary member of the Collective)!

Endangered Geographies
Now is a very exciting and rich time to be a geographer. Opportunities for us as professionals and as a field of study are developing at lightening speed. We  have a better knowledge and are more equipped than ever to understand a wide range of social, economic, and environmental issues empowering humanity as never before. Yet, in my view, there are many ways in which the potential of geography is under threat.

In this blog post I am going to outline five of these threats.

Threat 1 – Children’s Physical Geographies

Continue reading “Mission:Explore–Endangered Geographies”