Hume elected president of the National Council for Geographic Education
Susan Hume has a split personality — research-wise, that is.
Hume, associate professor of geography at SIUE, focuses her research on geographic education and, on the other end of the spectrum, people who immigrate to the U.S.
That passion is what got Hume elected to become president of the National Council for Geographic Education (NCGE).
“It’s obviously an honor,” she said. “I’ve been a member for a long time. I have always loved attending the (NCGE) conferences because it’s an opportunity to get out of my own university and network with other people who believe in promoting geographic education the same way I do.”
The council is made up of mostly kindergarten through 12th grade teachers, Hume said, and exists in advancing geographic education in schools all the way to the university level.
Hume has been a member since 1995 when she was earning her master’s degree in education. She said she joined the council in order to develop skills to become a teacher of geography having already gotten her undergraduate degree in that area. The NCGE is what helped her learn to become a teacher of geography.
Susan Hume, associate professor of geography at SIUE
“My undergrad didn’t necessarily teach me how to teach people geography,” she said. “The NCGE helped me to take the knowledge I have of geography as a discipline and translate that to a ninth grade classroom.”
Hume will act as vice president of research at the NCGE this coming year and will have that status for three years until becoming president. The council rotates vice presidents to become presidents for periods of time, so Hume is up next.
“I see it as one of those career high points but also now I have an opportunity to shape the way the direction geography education is headed,” she said.
Hume said she will continue to expand upon the NCGE’s continuing effort to showing kindergarten through 12th grade teachers how to train their students in a more technologically advanced fashion in geography. A lot of geography now deals with satellite imagery and computer-heavy geographic information systems, she said.
Geography education has also normally held a back seat in pre-college level education through social studies and history classes, Hume said. With the help of the council, geography has become more of a mainstay and Edwardsville High School has even implemented its first advanced placement human geography course this fall semester.
Without the NCGE, Hume said geography would still be looked at as the education where people memorize places on a map. However, through extensive promotion of the study, she hopes more freshmen will show up at universities wanting to major in geography, and not just to know which places are where on a map.
“Geography is about understanding the world around us; understanding everything from landform processes to climate patterns to populations to economics and political systems and how they all interact with each other,” Hume said.
She said the importance of a geographic education goes beyond just understanding the way things work. It may help to solve problems globally.
“It’s a discipline that brings together the natural sciences and the social sciences in a very integrative way,” Hume said. “I think there are real-world problems that need to be solved that can only be solved by bringing together seemingly separate subjects and separate knowledge bases.”
The NCGE will continue to promote geography education through its dedication to schools and at the political level, she said, especially when she’s president of the council.
Filed Under: Geography
