The new school year has started, which means I've officially ended the work I did for a summer research fellowship from the University of New Hampshire Graduate School, although there are still a few loose ends I hope to finish in the coming days and weeks. I've alluded to that work previously, but since it's mostly finished, I thought it might be useful to chronicle some of it here, in case it is of interest to anyone else. (Parts of this are based on my official report, which is why it's a little formal.)

I spent the summer studying the literary context of Virginia Woolf’s writings in the 1930s. The major result of this was that I developed a spreadsheet to chronicle her reading from 1930-1938 (the period during which she conceived and wrote her novel The Years and her book-length essay Three Guineas), a tool which from the beginning I intended to share with other scholars and readers, and so created with Google Sheets so that it can easily be viewed, updated, downloaded, etc. It's not quite done: I haven't finished adding information from Woolf's letters from 1936-1938, and there's one big chunk of reading notebook information (mostly background material for Three Guineas) that still needs to be added, but there's a plenty there.

Originally, I expected (and hoped) that I would spend a lot of time working with periodical sources, but within a few weeks this proved both impractical and unnecessary to my overall goals. The major literary review in England during this period was the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), but working with the TLS historical database proved difficult because there is no way to access whole issues easily, since every article is a separate PDF. If you know what you’re looking for, or can search by title or author, you can find what you need; but if you want to browse through issues, the database is cumbersome and unwieldy. Further, I had not realized the scale of material — the TLS was published weekly, and most reviews were 800-1,000 words, so they were able to publish about 2,000 reviews each year. Just collecting the titles, authors, and reviewers of every review would create a document the length of a hefty novel. The other periodical of particular interest is the New Statesman & Nation (earlier titled New Statesman & Athenaeum), which Leonard Woolf had been an editor of, and to which he contributed many reviews and essays. Dartmouth College has a complete set of the New Statesman in all its forms, but copies are in storage, must be requested days in advance, and cannot leave the library.

All of this work could be done, of course, but I determined that it would not be a good use of my time, because much more could be discovered through Woolf’s diaries, letters, and reading notebooks, supplemented by the diaries, letters, and biographies of other writers. (As well  as  Luedeking and Edmonds’ bibliography of Leonard Woolf, which includes summaries of all of his NS&N writings — perfectly adequate for my work.)

And so I began work on the spreadsheet. Though I chronicled all of Woolf’s references to her reading from 1930-1938, my own interest was primarily in what contemporary writers she was reading, and how that reading may have affected her conception and structure of The Years and, to a lesser extent, Three Guineas (to a lesser extent because her references in that book itself are more explicit, her purpose clearer). As I began the work, I feared I was on another fruitless path. During the first years of the 1930s, Woolf was reading primarily so as to write the literary essays in The Common Reader, 2nd Series, which contains little about contemporary writing, and from the essays themselves we know what she was reading.

But then in 1933 I struck gold with this entry from 2 September 1933:

I am reading with extreme greed a book by Vera Britain [sic], called The Testament of Youth. Not that I much like her. A stringy metallic mind, with I suppose, the sort of taste I should dislike in real life. But her story, told in detail, without reserve, of the war, & how she lost lover & brother, & dabbled her hands in entrails, & was forever seeing the dead, & eating scraps, & sitting five on one WC, runs rapidly, vividly across my eyes. A very good book of its sort. The new sort, the hard anguished sort, that the young write; that I could never write. (Diary 4, 177)

Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth was published in 1933, and was one of the bestselling books of the year. It remains in print, and a film of it was in US theatres this summer. What struck me in Woolf’s response to it was that she called it a book “I could never write” — and she did so just as The Years was finding its ultimate form in her mind, and only months before she started to write the sections concerned with World War One. What also struck me was that her response to Testament of Youth was in some ways similar to her infamous response to Joyce’s Ulysses, a book she thought vulgar and a bit too obsessed with bodily functions, but which also clearly fascinated and influenced her.

One of the things that occurred to me after reading Woolf’s note on Testament of Youth was that The Years is among her most physically vivid novels. Sarah Crangle has said of it: “The Years is a culminating point in Woolf ’s representation of the abject, as she incessantly foregrounds the body and its productions” (9). The September 2 diary entry shows that Woolf was highly aware of this foregrounding in Vera Brittain’s (very popular) book, and her framing of herself as part of an older generation and someone unable to write in such a way may have worked as a kind of challenge to herself.

I then sought out Testament of Youth and read it (all 650 pages) with Woolf in mind. What qualities of this book caused it to run so rapidly across her eyes? She herself wrote in a letter to her friend Ethel Smyth on September 6: “Vera Brittain has written a book which kept me out of bed till I'd read it. Why?” (Letters 5, 223). I asked Why? myself quite a bit as I began reading Testament, because the first 150 pages or so are not anything a contemporary reader is likely to find gripping. And yet reading with Woolf in mind made it quite clear: The first section of Testament is all about Vera Brittain’s attempt to get into Oxford, and Woolf herself had been denied (because of her gender) the university education her brothers received, a fact that bothered her throughout her life. The ins and outs of Oxford entrance exams may not be scintillating reading for most people, but for a woman who had never even been able to consider taking those exams, and yet dearly yearned for an educational experience of the sort men were allowed, Testament provides a vivid vicarious experience. The central part of the book, about Brittain’s experience as a nurse during the war, also provided vicarious experience for Woolf, whose own experience of the war was far less immediate. Woolf lost some friends and distant relations in the war (most notably the poet Rupert Brooke, with whom she was friendly and may have had some romantic feelings for), but did not experience anything like the trauma that Brittain did: the loss of all of her closest male friends, including her fiancé and her brother. Nor did Woolf see mutilated bodies and corpses, as Brittain did.

Woolf and Brittain were very much aware of each other — Brittain, in fact, makes passing mention to A Room of One’s Own in Testament of Youth — and the first book-length study of Woolf in English was written by Brittain’s great friend Winifred Holtby (an important character in the latter part of Testament; after Holtby’s death in 1935, Brittain wrote a biography of her titled Testament of Friendship, which Woolf thought presented too flat a view of Holtby, a person she seems to have come to respect, though she didn’t much like Holtby’s writing). There is, though, very little scholarship on Woolf, Brittain, and Holtby together, perhaps because Brittain and Holtby seem like such different writers from Woolf in that they were much more committed to a kind of social realism that Woolf abjured. There's a lot of work still remaining to be done on the three writers together. Not only is Testament of Youth a book that can be brought into conversation with The Years, but Brittain’s novel Honourable Estate, published one year before The Years, has numerous similarities in its scope and goals to The Years, though it seems almost impossible that it had any direct influence, since it was published when Woolf was doing final revisions of The Years and she didn’t much like Brittain’s writing, so was unlikely to have read the book (I’ve certainly found no evidence that she did).

In the course of this research, I soon discovered that UNH’s own emerita professor Jean Kennard published a book in 1989 titled Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby: A Working Partnership, the first (and still only) scholarly study of the two writers together. I read the book avidly, as I had taken a seminar on Virginia Woolf with Prof. Kennard in the spring of 1998 at UNH as an undergraduate, and I owe much of my love of Woolf to that seminar. The book looks closely at each authors’ writings and proposes that their friendship was a kind of lesbian relationship, an idea that has been somewhat controversial (Deborah Gorham’s study of Brittain offers a nuanced response).

In addition to exploring the connections and resonances between Woolf, Brittain, and Holtby, I looked at three writers of the younger generation whom Woolf knew personally and paid close attention to: John Lehmann, William Plomer, and Christopher Isherwood. Lehmann worked for the Woolfs at their Hogarth Press in the early thirties, left for a while, then returned and took a more prominent role, buying out Virginia Woolf’s share of the press in the late 1930s. Lehmann and the Woolfs had an often contentious relationship, as he was very interested in the work of younger writers, particularly poets, and Virginia Woolf especially had more mixed feelings about the directions that writers such as W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender were going in. Woolf wrote a relatively long letter to Spender  on 25 June 1935 about his recent collection of criticism, The Destructive Element, in which she positions her own aesthetics both in sympathy and tension with Spender’s, particularly Spender’s perspective on D.H. Lawrence.

Spender’s defense of Lawrence helps explain some of Virginia Woolf’s resistance to the younger writer’s aesthetic. One of the insights that my work this summer provided (at least to me) was the extent to which Woolf thought about, and was bothered by, Lawrence, who died in March 1930. (In 1931, Woolf wrote "Notes on D.H. Lawrence", primarily about Sons and Lovers.) She had complex feelings about Lawrence’s writing — disgust, frustration, and annoyance mixed with fascination. She often said she hadn’t read much of Lawrence’s work, but from the amount of references she makes to it, and the number of critical studies and memoirs about Lawrence that she read and commented on, I don’t think her protestations of not having read much of Lawrence are quite accurate — she was clearly familiar with all his major novels, and I suspect that in her letters she downplayed this familiarity as a hedge against the strong feelings of correspondents who thought Lawrence to be among the greatest British novelists of the age. Lawrence’s work was very much on Woolf’s mind in the first years of the 1930s, and it therefore seems likely to me that The Years was also conceived as a kind of response to The Rainbow and Women in Love in particular. But that's more hunch than anything, and this is a topic for more study.

John Lehmann introduced Christopher Isherwood to the Woolfs, and encouraged them to publish his second novel, The Memorial, which they did. In 1935, they also published his first Berlin novel, Mr. Norris Changes Trains (in the US, The Last of Mr. Norris), then in 1937 his novella Sally Bowles and in 1939 the interlinked stories of Goodbye to Berlin (later to be adapted as the play I Am a Camera and the musical Cabaret). Isherwood’s experience of Berlin in the 1930s was of particular interest to the Woolfs, who themselves (with some trepidation, given the fact that Leonard was Jewish) traveled through Germany briefly in 1935 to see the extent of the spread of Nazism.

William Plomer was a writer the Woolfs published in 1926, and who became close friends with Lehmann, Isherwood, Auden, and Spender. Plomer was born to British parents in South Africa, attended schools in England, then returned to Johannesburg, where he finished college and then worked as a farmhand and then with his family at a trading post in Zulu lands. It was there that he wrote Turbott Wolfe, based partly on his experience at the trading post and partly on his friendships among painters and artists in Johannesburg. He was only 20 years old when he sent it to the Woolfs, and they printed it soon after Mrs. Dalloway. Leonard was particularly interested in African politics and anti-imperialism, and the novel’s theme of racial mixing as a solution to the tensions between races in South Africa was iconoclastic and proved controversial. Plomer left South Africa and spent time in Japan, experiences which informed his later novel (also published by the Woolfs) Sado, a story that included homosexual overtones. (Like Lehmann, Isherwood, Auden, and Spender, Plomer was gay, though less openly and comfortably so than his friends.) Plomer would publish a number of books with the Woolfs, including some well-received volumes of poetry, but eventually moved to publish his fiction and autobiographies with Jonathan Cape, where he was an editorial reader (and convinced Cape to publish the first novel of his friend Ian Fleming, Casino Royale — a very young Fleming, in fact, had written Plomer a fan letter after reading Turbott Wolfe, the two became friends when Fleming was a journalist in the 1930s, and eventually Fleming dedicated Goldfinger to Plomer).

Plomer became a more frequent member of the Woolf’s social circle than any other young writer that I’ve noticed, and Virginia Woolf seems to have felt almost motherly toward him. Aesthetically, he was far less threatening than the other young men of the Auden generation, and though his novels can easily be read through a queer frame, he was more circumspect about the topic than his peers.

As the summer wound down and I continued to work through Woolf’s diaries and letters, I became curious about the place of Elizabeth Bowen’s work in her life. Woolf and Bowen were friends, and Bowen’s work shows many Woolfian qualities, but Woolf made very few conclusive statements about Bowen’s novels that I have been able to find so far — mostly, she acknowledge Bowen sending her each new novel, and always said she would read it soon, but I have only found definite evidence that she read one, The House in Paris, which is set soon after World War I and, like Mrs. Dalloway, takes place over the course of a single day. Like the connections and resonances between Woolf, Brittain, and Holtby, the relationship between the works of Woolf and Bowen seems to be ripe for further study.

But the summer has ended, and my studies must now move toward my Ph.D. qualifying exams, so the British writers of the 1930s, as fascinating as they were, must move now to the background as I widen my view toward everything there is to say and know about modernism, postcolonial studies, and queer studies... Read the rest of this post

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Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO) launched in 2003 with 700 titles. Now, on its tenth birthday, it’s the online home of over 9,000 titles from Oxford University Press’s distinguished academic list, and part of University Press Scholarship Online. To celebrate OSO turning ten, we’ve invited a host of people to reflect on the past ten years of online academic publishing, and what the next ten might bring.

By Adrastos Omissi

As someone who has lived out his entire academic career in a research environment augmented by digital resources, it can be easy to allow familiarity to breed contempt where the Internet is concerned. When I began my undergraduate degree in the autumn of 2005, Oxford’s Bodleian Library, as well as every faculty and college library, had already digitized their search functions, Wikipedia was approaching one million English articles, and all major journals were routinely publishing online (as well as busily uploading their back catalogues). Free and instantaneous access to a vast quantity of research material is, for those of my generation, simply assumed.

The Internet’s greatest gift is text, in every permutation and definition of that word imaginable. For research students, one of the greatest obstacles is to acquire the necessary information that they need to make their own work a solid, and above all, living piece of scholarship, in communication with the wider academic world. Text is, ultimately, the sine qua non of this struggle.

Each specialism has its own particular loves, its debts owed to the Internet. Find any doctoral candidate in Britain today and they’ll each have their own version of ‘I couldn’t have completed me doctorate without online product X.’ For me, a classicist, it was the digitization and free availability of an increasing proportion of the written records of the ancient world. Online libraries of Greek and Latin texts, libraries like Perseus, Lacus Curtius, and the Latin Library, or searchable databases like Patrologia Latina brought the classical world to life (and to my laptop).

Of course, it’s not just ancient books that are now open to easy access from anywhere that the Internet can reach. When I was an undergraduate I looked into how much it would cost me to buy the entire Cambridge Ancient History series, which I felt would make an invaluable addition to my bookshelves. The answer – somewhere in the region of £1,600 – was enough for me to go weak at the knee. Now, I have all fourteen volumes in PDF. Google Books and the increasing digitization of the archives of publishers and academic libraries means that paradigm shifting debate can now beam into student rooms and even into private homes.

Just as the automated production line turned the automobile, once a bastion of elitism, into an affordable commodity for the average household, so the Internet is now putting books that would have once been hidden in ivory towers into the hands of any person with the desire to find them. And as hardware improves, these options become more and more exciting. Tablet computing means that this enormous corpus of academic texts and original sources is now available on devices that fit into a coat pocket. Gone – or going – are the curved spines and broken bag straps that were formerly the lot of any student forced to move between libraries.

Of course, not everyone is beaming as barriers of cost and inconvenience are stripped away from academic texts. Publishers still have businesses to run and it will be interesting to see in years to come how sharply the lines of battle come to be drawn. Nor is the marginalization of the book, a thing of beauty in its own right, much of a cause for celebration. But for those wishing to access academic texts, the trend is up, and texts that would once have been found only after a long search through some dusty archive or at the outlay of several hundred pounds are now nothing more than a Google search away.

Adrastos Omissi grew up in Jersey, in the Channel Islands. He recently completed a doctorate in Roman History at St John’s College, Oxford, and now works as a researcher for the social enterprise consultancy, Oxford Ventures.

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Posting has been nonexistent here for a bit because not only is it the start of a new school year (a time when posting is always light here), but, as I've mentioned before, I'm also now beginning the PhD in Literature program at the University of New Hampshire. This not only involves lots of time in classes, time teaching First-Year Writing, and time doing homework and class prep, but I'm also driving over 300 miles a week commuting to and from campus. And of course there are also the inevitable writing projects — currently, I'm writing an introduction for a new translation from the Japanese of a very interesting novel (more on that later, I'm sure), a couple of book reviews and review-essays and essay-essays, a couple of short stories, and the always very slowly progressing book manuscript on 1980s action movies. And I've got a couple video essays I want to make in the next month or so. And I'm editing a short film I shot this summer. And, well, naturally, blogging is not really at the forefront of my mind right now. But it is there, somewhere, in amidst everything else in that rattletrap of a mind.

Me & my pal Jacques

I've been wondering, too, what exactly to write about the whole PhD thing. For instance, the first question that occurs to people when I say I'm doing this thing at my advanced age: For god's sake WHY? My answer is simple and honest: They're giving me health insurance and a teaching stipend, which is actually a step up for me, since the stipend is a few hundred dollars more than I made teaching as an adjunct, and now I won't have to pay for my own health insurance. So I actually make more money now as a graduate student than I did as a college teacher. (Welcome to the topsy-turvy world of higher ed!) And I only have to teach one class per term and I get to take classes where I get to read a lot and write a lot and talk about, you know, litritcher. What's not to like? Of course, I know as well as anybody that the last thing the world wants is another lit PhD, and there are no jobs, and even if there are jobs the tenure track is disappearing rapidly and adjunctification is the name of the game in higher ed, and all that jazz. I know. Boy, do I know! It's entirely possible and even likely that I will never get a full-time job on the tenure track. But I honestly don't even know if I want a full-time job on the tenure track, or if I want to stay in college teaching at all. I'm very conflicted about that. But I'm not conflicted about the stuff I really do love: I love the research, I love academic conversations, I love reading complex and difficult stuff. And for a little while, that's what I'll get to do. I'm not going into any financial debt to do it, so I figure it's about as good a plan as anything else. I'm still open to marrying a successful investment banker, winning the lottery, and/or discovering I'm the lost heir of a billionaire. But this will do for now.

The other thing I wonder about is how much I should write about the progress of my classes and research. For now, I'm not really going to write a lot about it. This term, I'm only able to take one literature class because I also have to take a course on teaching college composition. I can't pretend to enjoy that part of this. All the Composition & Rhetoric people are lovely and brilliant, but I am very much not a Comp/Rhet person. Really, I think I've got more affinity for mechanical engineering than I do Comp/Rhet. I'm glad there are people out there doing it, because it can really be noble work, but I don't know of another field in the discipline of English about which I am less interested, so surviving 30+ hours of it during orientation and now 3 hours/week of it for class, plus teaching the First Year Writing course, is nearly enough to make me rush home and do math problems for fun.

The literature class I have this term is on trauma theory, which I didn't even know was a thing until fairly recently. I've generally avoided psychological approaches to literature, and so this is an interesting foray outside my comfort zone. I would be deeply, deeply surprised if it makes me more fond of psychological approaches to literature than I have been in the past, but it's a provocative class and I think I will at least get a good paper on Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country out of it. We'll see. First, I have to survive reading Freud, a writer I sometimes find really quite hilarious, but other people apparently take him seriously and therefore don't appreciate my giggles. (Pause for a passage from Deleuze & Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, as translated by Brian Massumi: "That day, the Wolf-Man rose from the couch particularly tired. He knew that Freud had a genius for brushing up against the truth and passing it by, then filling the void with associations. He knew that Freud knew nothing about wolves, or anuses for that matter. The only thing Freud understood was what a dog is, and a dog's tail. It wasn't enough. It wouldn't be enough.")

What I'm most enjoying, honestly, is having access to a nice big library every day. I love Plymouth State's Lamson Library beyond all others, because it was my savior as a child and then over the last five years I've been able to cajole and harangue the librarians into buying lots of books and movies that were of vital interest to me, so the collection now bears quite a bit of my imprint. But Plymouth doesn't have the resources of UNH, and so I already have piles of books on all sorts of different subjects checked out, because I easily get bibliographic whims — for instance, a sudden desire to read all of Donna Haraway. Many of my happiest hours working on my master's at Dartmouth were spent in the library there, a library I still return to at least a few times a year.

Is it any surprise, then, that I'm doing a PhD? The only surprise is that it took me this long to get organized enough to do it. After all, I'm really not fit for any other sort of endeavor!

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From Grant Overstake, Author of Maggie Vaults Over the Moon: “I’ve just finished reading a great new sports book about track and field titled, Wannabe Distance God: The Thirst, Angst, and Passion of Running in the Chase Pack. This memoir … Continue reading →

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A lot of people stop by this site because they’re curious to learn what it takes to not only write a children’s book, but to write a successful one. Some authors appear at workshops where they charge hundreds of dollars to dispense such insider tips. Not me. Today, I’m giving the good stuff out for free. I only ask that you thank me in your acknowledgements and cut me in on any foreign rights. It’s a fair trade for this invaluable wisdom. Let’s get down to it.

First off, the old advice is often the best advice. Write what you know. Do you know a puppy that’s a bit poky? How about some teenagers who hunt each other for sport? Connecting with children is about connecting with the world around you. A few monkeys don’t hurt either. That’s right. Forget wizards, vampires and zombies. Monkeys are what distinguish great children’s books. Try to imagine The Secret Garden without Jose Fuzzbuttons, the wisecracking capuchin whose indelible catchphrase “Aye-yaye-yaye, Mami, hands off the yucca!” is still bandied about schoolyards today? I don’t think you can.

Of course, the magic that is artistic inspiration must find its way in there. So how do you grab hold of it? Christopher Paolini swears by peyote-fueled pilgrimages to the Atacama Desert. I’m more of a traditionalist. A pint of gin and a round of Russian Roulette with Maurice Sendak always gets my creative juices flowing. Have fun. Experiment. Handguns and hallucinogens need not be involved. Though I see no reason to rule them out. Find what works for you.

Now, you’ll inevitably face a little writer’s block. There are two words that cure this problem and cure it quick. Public Domain. Dust off some literary dud and add spice to it. Kids dig this stuff. For instance, you could take some Edith Wharton and inject it with flatulence. The Age of Innocence and Farts.  Done. Easy. Bestseller.

I give this last bit of advice with a caveat. Resist the temptation to write unauthorized sequels to beloved classics. I speak from experience. My manuscripts for You Heard What I Said Dog, Get Your Arse Outta Here! and God? Margaret Again…I’m Late have seen the bottom of more editors’ trash cans than I care to mention. Newbery bait? Sure. Immune to the unwritten rules of the biz? Hardly.

Okay, let’s jump forward. So now you’ve got your masterpiece, but how the heck are you going to sell the thing? Truth be told, you’re going to need an advanced degree first. As anyone will inform you, kid lit authors without PhDs or MFAs are rarely taken seriously. If you can’t work Derrida or Foucault into a pitch letter, then you certainly can’t survive a 30-minute writing workshop with Mrs. Sumner’s 5th period reading class. So invest 60-100K and 3-6 years of your life. Then let the bidding war begin.

In the off chance that your book isn’t going to sell for six figures, try blackmail. Sounds harsh, but the children’s book industry runs almost exclusively on hush money and broken kneecaps. I mean, Beverly Cleary doesn’t even own a car. So why is she always carrying a tire iron?

Money is now under the mattress and the editorial process begins. Don’t worry at all about this. Editors won’t even read your book. They’ll simply call in Quentin Blake for some illustrations and then run the whole thing through a binding machine they keep in the back of the o

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I just returned from the National Council for Geographic Education Conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The purpose of this conference is for geographers, teachers of geography and those who have businesses related to or a passion for geography to get together to share information, research and experience about teaching geography to students from elementary school through college.

This was my first conference with NCGE, and quite a fascinating experience (especially from the perspective of a children’s travel book author.) Over 500 people attended from all over the USA and Canada and more than 210 workshops and sessions were offered over the course of 3 days. Here’s the gist of what I learned with the sessions I was able to attend:

1. Lack of geography knowledge in the USA is an epidemic from elementary school, through the university level and beyond.
2. Global and spacial thinking are paramount to not only education but to our nation’s political relationships with other countries.
3. There are many exceptional software programs, lesson plans, books, events and more to help teachers and parents teach geography.
4. Geography is not just about finding places on a map. It’s about people, cultures, plants, animals, weather, space, distance and so much more.

Specific sessions I attended:

1. Rand McNally has just released a brand new and extremely impressive 22^nd Edition of Goode’s World Atlas, the most phenomenal teaching atlas ever. Every geographer and teacher must have this. I’ve got one!
2. National Geographic Society offers an extraordinary program for schools called Giant Traveling Maps. Floor maps the size of rooms are rented out to schools all over the USA for unforgettable lessons in geography.
3. ESRI offers the world’s most comprehensive and advanced Geographic Information Systems to teach geography. You’ve got to try their software products to experience the benefits yourself.
4. 3^rd Grade teacher, Marilyn Pineda from Comanche Pubic Schools in Oklahoma shared how music and literature can be used effectively to teach geography. (This was right up my Lilly Badilly alley!)
5. Two teachers, with great senses of humor, from the Mississippi Geography Alliance, Sandra K. Morgan and June Hollis, demonstrated how to use a large floor map, nursery rhymes and songs to teach US geography to elementary age children.
6. Through Coppin State University and a generous grant from NASA, Dr. Doug Reardon told us how geography education is being transformed in West Baltimore, a low income area. The stories of the teachers in this district are inspiring and will set a standard for all those who long to bring geography into the classroom, for all schools in the USA.
7. Dr. Cynthia Resor from Eastern KY University talked about how Place Based Education can help students learn about geography, starting in their own communities.
8. Dr. Jimmy Dunn from the University of Northern Colorado wrote about Setting New Geography Standards for Colorado. He spent a lot of time quizzing his students about geography using different methods and tracking the results. Fascinating!
9. Venice, Italy is sinking due to excessive flooding, which is cased by a number of factors. Geographer, Dr. Denise Blanchard of Texas State University gave a fascinated session on the causes and possible solutions to the problem.

FYI – I hosted a workshop called “Fun with Geography in the Classroom.”

These were just a small fraction of the many learning experiences to be had at this year’s NCGE conference. I would have loved to attend every one of the sessions, but that would be impossible. I’m looking forward to next year.

To join NCGE, click here. Remember, you don’t have to be a geographer or teacher to care about geography education in America.

Cme back tomorrow . . . it’s all about Puerto Rico.

Geography Matters More than You Know!

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One of Smart Poodle Publishing’s favorite websites of all time is WanderingEducators.com - not just because I am a contributing editor - but because this site provides readers with essential content about traveling and geography. Publisher Jessie Voigts is one of the most brilliant and creative people I’ve ever met. And as you can see from these photos, she’s got a way with the camera. She was generous enough to share them with us. They were taken in her home state of Michigan. Thank you Jessie!

All photos © Jessie Voigts, PhD

If you’d like to read my latest guidebook review (Rio an Buenos Aires) on her website, you can find it here.

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Our readers know how passionate we are about geography education here at Smart Poodle Publishing. By joining the National Council for Geographic Education (NCGE), we have connected with one of our nation’s foremost geography education experts, Dr. Joseph Kerski. We are so fortunate that he agreed to take time out of his busy schedule for an interview.

Dr. Kerski’s resume is beyond impressive! He obtained his PhD in Geography from the University of Colorado in 2000 and has authored or edited many textbooks, book reviews and articles about mapping and geography. His expertise is in demand at universities and public schools, where he teaches classes on an ongoing basis. Dr. Kerski has received many grants and awards for his work and is an active member of many professional organizations. Formerly he has worked for the US Bureau of Census and the US Geological Survey. Currently he is the Education Manager for Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), a company that designs and develops the world’s leading geographic information system (GIS) technology.

Dr. Kerski on a mission to improve our geography education

Can you explain to us what a Geographic Information System (GIS) is and how it is used?

Debbie, you are too kind with these comments about me.  We’re all in this together, you and I and others, who are seeking to help increase geographic literacy all over the world.  A GIS is comprised of hardware, software, methods, spatial data (maps, databases, satellite imagery), but most importantly a network of people who seek to improve their everyday decision making.  Their decisions incorporate the “where” question, and GIS was created to help them analyze the world using maps and data to best answer the “where” question.

What types of organizations benefit from your software systems?

Any organization that seeks to improve its efficiency and understanding of the “whys of where’” in their community, region, country, or world.  These organizations—academia, government, nonprofits, businesses—range from Sears, who wanted to save money on the routing of their home delivery vehicles, to Culvers, who want to site their restaurants in the locations that will make the most profit, to a city government, which seeks to reduce waste and redundancy and improve water, transportation, and planning services, all the way to the United Nations Environment Programme, which seeks to promote sustainable agriculture and to understand environmental impacts.  There are more applications in law enforcement, public safety, real estate, energy, natural hazards, education, and much more here at ESRI.

What is spatial thinking and what does it have to do with our natural environment?

Spatial thinking is thinking holistically and geographically about how phenomena and processes display a pattern that we can detect through mapping it.  It is a critical thinking skill, one that when coupled with using GIS and GPS technologies aids the student in excellent career pathways, and one that is of incredible importance in our 21st Century.  After all, every major issue we face—from climate change to urban sprawl to renewable energy to biodiversity loss to political instability—has a spatial component.  It can be better understood through spatial analysis in a GIS environment.

You worked as a cartographer, which really sounds interesting to me. Can you tell us what that entails?

A cartographer is a mapmaker, which in the not-too-distant past used film, needles, and laborious techniques to make accurate maps.  Nowadays, all cartographers use GIS and other computer tools to do their work, yet the goal is still the same—to produce timely, accurate map data for people to better understand the Earth and all that is in it.

You sent me a link to the video of the world’s largest mapping room of the US Geological Survey in Denver. It is massive, and I’d love to see that myself some day! How many maps are housed in that facility, and where do they come from?

The USGS is the nation’s mapping agency, and has been around since 1879.  They have been making maps since then, and the results are stored in the map room that I filmed in that video, but also, increasingly, in digital map files.  The maps include topographic maps, geologic maps, hydrologic maps, maps of oil, coal, and gas, and much more—even maps of planets!  About 75,000 individual titles and over 30,000,000 individual maps are in this collection.

It’s hard to imagine that many maps in one place! What inspired you to become a geographer?

First, I love maps.  Second, I love to explore the Earth.  Third, I love people.  Fourth, I want to make a difference in our world by helping people understand it, appreciate it, and work together on common goals.

He’s got the whole world in his hands!

As a children’s book author visiting schools with my simple geography program, I knew going in that American students were lacking in geography knowledge, but I never realized just how much. I was most disappointed by the teachers’ lack of basic US geography knowledge. Why do you think Americans are so seriously lacking in geography knowledge?

It is simply because we have neglected geography education in our K-12 educational system for the past century, and are reaping what we have sowed.  It has become at best, buried under the Social Studies, and at worst, not taught at all or perhaps as a 1 semester class in Grade 7 and/or Grade 9.  When it is taught, it is often taught as a memorization in country names, imports and exports, or other such facts, rather than the study of the interaction between people on the landscape and environment.

How does this hurt us as a nation?

It hurts us in our international politics, in the way we treat the environment, and in economics, because students who understand geography and its importance are much better employees in a tremendous variety of fields.

How do we compare to other countries in geography education?

If you dig into the Roper Surveys and other reports, we are not at the bottom, but for a developed country such as ours that has a leadership responsibility throughout the world, we are faring quite abysmally.

What can our nation’s schools do to improve the situation?

I wish to point out here that there are a good many wonderful geography educators at all levels – K-12, community college, university, and in informal education such as 4-H, Girl Scouts, libraries, and museums.  They are doing amazing work and I am privileged to work with many of them.  To improve the situation, I think we need to ensure that geography is funded under No Child Left Behind,  we need to support our geography education association (the National Council for Geographic Education), we need to ensure that our schools are high-tech centers, not places where technology support is lacking, we need to educate our public officials about the importance of geography and how it can help them as well as the entire society, we need to encourage immersive, field-based, investigations at all levels of education, rather than superficial instruction that is based on testing and memorization.  There are additional things that have to do with how our entire society values education, but these I would rank highest.

Are we making progress?

In some ways, yes; take a look at some of the things that educators are doing with GIS, for example—investigating water quality, crime, migration, ecoregions, renewable energy, and much more.  In some ways, things have not improved or have become worse (especially in the case of getting students outside to do meaningful fieldwork).

What do you foresee in the future for geography education in America? How will it change?

We can either maintain the status quo and suffer the consequences, or take action to improve the situation for the benefit of our students, our teachers, and the entire society.   I see some educators and students continuing to do amazing things, and other students who are so turned off by our educational system that they have given up on it.

What advice do you have for parents who want to make sure their children are well educated when it comes to geography?

Advocate strong geography education in your school district and with your elected officials.

What is the most rewarding aspect of your work?

Working with my colleagues both inside and outside ESRI, including educators all over the world, who are dedicated to excellence, one student at a time.

Your career has required you to travel all over the world. What is your favorite place on earth?

I have been to Istanbul, Taipei, Tunis, Munich, and elsewhere over the past year, but I still enjoy ordinary places—meadows, grasslands, prairies, shorelines, canyons, deserts, and I also enjoy small town squares, caves, even cemeteries.

What do your own children have to say about what you do? And are they geography savvy themselves?

I was once named “World’s Nerdiest Dad” by a newspaper who wrote about me geocaching with my children.

What an awesome map!

How is it possible that you have enough time every day to accomplish all you have accomplished in your career?

Debbie, you are very kind, but I am very conscious of standing on the shoulders of my colleagues and other giants who have come before me.  We can each do what we have been given the opportunity to do and I am blessed that I am working for an organization that supports GIS and geography in education as much as ESRI does.

When you are not working, what do you enjoy doing most?

Caving, playing the guitar, geocaching, and riding on rails-to-trails bicycle trails.

What advice would you give to a young student who is considering a career in geography?

First, follow your dreams.  You can get a job in geography!  Second, gain some skills in GIS, web mapping applications, GPS, statistics, and programming.  Third, don’t neglect the content skills in physical and cultural geography, speaking, writing, mathematics, history, earth science, and reading.  Fourth, if you want to make a difference in a ‘green’ and ‘hi-tech’ career, geography is for you!

We so appreciate  your insight, Dr. Kerski! Thank you for taking the time to tak to us. We commend you for your passion to make such a big difference in the the future of our nation’s education. I hope our readers are inspired by your interview to start asking their children’s schools to improve their geography education.

For more information or to reach Dr. Joseph Kerski, click here.

View his geography videos here.

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Oval Beach, Lake Michigan

Saugatuck, Michigan

Incredible Winter Photos shared with us by Jessie Voights, PhD

www.WanderingEducators.com

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I just got a letter from my university that started "Dear Dr". I have officially finished! Yay!

(And the university just managed to scrap in under the one year anniversary of my submission. Perhaps I should send them a congratulatory note too?)

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I finally my got thesis examiner reports! I passed! I've only had a quick look (have to go to work) but one examiner points out typos (and has a lovely and flattering summary) while the other seems to contain vaguer statements that should be fine to address. I'll write more later, but just thought I'd share the good news!

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Greetings! Maddy here!

Today we went on location to film Hellboy 2 and it definitely was not as fun for me. The temperature was about 100° F and 38° C, meaning it was quite hot! I got a little tan on my arms though! Anyway, they were filming up on a hill and I wasn't allowed to go up there so I just had to sit down by myself and read my book, and occasionally people would tell me to move because I was in the camera shot. They are building a whole troll town in a quarry for the movie, and we got to go visit it today. The air felt really good down there because it was quite cold!! We had to wear hard-hats. Tee hee hee! Apparently where we were filming on location there were many ticks, and I was just wearing white flip-flops. Guillermo wanted me to wear socks so my feetsies wouldn't be exposed to the ticks. We went to costumes to see if they had any socks, and they did. Unfortunately it was a pair of men's long black socks. I think I might have looked a little funny walking around in pink shorts, black socks, and white flip-flops. Talk about embarrassing.

Dad would also like me to put this link up. It's a Stardust review. I am very excited about Stardust by the way! I am going to the premiere in Hollywood! Woot woot!!! A lot of people at my school have made up secret gestures for me to do if I happen to be on TV that will send secret messages to them. You're not allowed to know those secret gestures because they are secret. Did I mention that the secret gestures are secret?

Tomorrow is my sister's birthday so you should expect a post all about her her her! Go Holly.. go Holly ..it's your birthday...

Okay, well I want to get an early night tonight because I only got 4 hours of sleep last night! CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT!?!? Well, you should. It's true.

--Addy-May (That's Pig Latin.)

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