Teaching Hazards Geography and Geographic Information Systems: A Middle School Level Experience

Hazards are taught with the belief that knowing something about their occurrence might help us avoid their consequences. The integrative nature of hazards - physical and social systems bound together - is attractive to the student and the instructor alike. Answering why we teach hazards is fairly straightforward. A more pressing question at present is this: how should we teach about hazards? To a large degree, attention towards how we teach hazards in a K-12 environment has been sparse. In this paper we explore the challenges faced when introducing hazards geography in a pre-collegiate setting. Following a review of the status of teaching hazards and the use of geographic information systems as an instructional aid, we outline a hazards course taught successfully for middle school students and discuss implementation obstacles for the traditional classroom.