Self-Discovered Human Connections with Planet Earth: Learning from the GEP's Earth Wall Chart

The 2006 National Geographic-Roper Survey revealed that "too many young Americans [aged 18-24] have a limited understanding of the world." In effort to increase our graduate students' grasp of the current state of the world, we decided to incorporate the Global Education Project's [GEP] full-color, 27 x 36-inch Earth wall chart into a course designed to improve secondary and tertiary science teaching.

Designed with over 100 data-rich maps and graphs, the chart offers geoeducators and their students an informed, unbiased, panoramic view of the planet's most critical resources, plus associated environmental and humanitarian issues.

In a Spring 2008 university graduate biogeoscience education class (N=20), we required each student to have a copy of the GEP's Earth chart. We assigned weekly topical subsets of the chart's contents for focused study, discussion (electronic/in-class), and subsequent integration across the entire semester. In addition to using the chart as one of our texts, we also incorporated an online course by Harvard scientists entitled "The Habitable Planet: A Systems Approach to Environmental Science" (2008), plus the science education textbook "Active Learning in Secondary and College Science Classrooms" by Michael and Modell (2003).

Triangulated quizzes, examination items, and anonymous course survey responses directly linked to the Earth chart revealed the following key findings regarding human connections with Planet Earth. The majority of students: (a) increased their personal knowledge of the distribution and limits of the Earth's resources; (b) shifted their knowledge and interest horizons from regional or national to global; (c) recalibrated their own professed consumption patterns to accommodate their new understandings of global resource realities; (d) expressed intent to reduce their ecological footprints; and (e) confided that the chart had impacted their personal discourse positions on Earth-related issues, and heightened the feeling that they were familiar and necessary stewards of Planet Earth.