Professional Development - How big is Africa?

For my professional development, I attended a lecture on campus about African cartography. There was a beautiful collection of maps that people have drawn to represent the content of Africa. Later as a class, my Geography peers and I discussed the geography of Africa and how it really was not part of our Social Studies Education. Which got us thinking...

As future teachers, it is our job to give Africa the recognition it deserves. In schools, it is is not a main component, and statistics show that most school children think Africa is much smaller than it is. They think it is smaller, because it is given smaller importance as compared to other continents like Europe. To show it's true size, we found this image here. 

Another discussion we had about teaching Africa is to stress to our future students that Africa is made up of different countries, just like North America is. Americans tend to lump Africans together, but the people living on the continent are diverse and live in extremely diverse areas. Although there are some people who live in poverty, there are people who are wealthier there, too. It is an important theme to teach students overall to not make prejudices about a society. To finish off our discussion, we looked for some lesson plans or ideas that followed our vision of teaching Africa's geography. Boston University actually has an outreach program that I personally like for grades k-12.

Overall, the discussion helped us all grow in what we want to teach as educators, as well as how to defend our ideas. Looking for professional lesson plans and talking together helped us get more comfortable with the idea of using reputable sources for our lesson plans.