Conveying the Applications and Relevance of the Powerful Geography Approach through Humanitarian Mapping

The Powerful Geography approach entails strengthening the relationship among curricula, student aspirations and motivations, and applications and practices of geographers in business, government, and nonprofit organizations. As a practical response to the GeoCapabilities project’s vision of future geography curricula based on conceptions of powerful knowledge, Powerful Geography is the idea that curricula connecting geography careers to student aspirations can help teachers make powerful knowledge accessible for students, specifically by helping students recognize relationships between geography and life beyond the classroom. Powerful Geography is a replicable approach to creating curricula that account for differences in state standards, course topics, student demographics, and school contexts. To illustrate this method in practice, the authors designed a humanitarian mapping lesson according to the approach.