Places of Practice, and the Practice of Science

This is no idle danger in Colorado, and my sponsor’s fear was that the inclusion of A I D S as a topic might jeopardize not only the course itself, but also the standards movement. In the end, I agreed not to make a discussion of A I D S explicit, but I did provide a number of links in the course to A I D S resources and studies on the web. My decision, whether rightly or wrongly made, was that the Standards as a whole, and their larger critical potential was more impor tant than staging a battle over including explicit discussions of AIDS. Such is the nature of academic work in a contemporary United States in which conservative cultural power is also very much conservative economic power. The larger point remains, however. There is a desperate need for critical geographers to work with teachers so as to chip away at that conservative power, and to provide teachers with resources for teaching a fuller, better geography. In my working with secondary school teachers in Colorado I find a great eagerness for a more critical approach to geography. I also find that most of these teachers simply do not have the background or training to know where or how to find critical scholarship and to translate it into effective teaching material. If they teach a boring place-names sort of geography, it is usually because they simply have not been exposed to anything else. Without denigrating those academics who are working directly and full-time on geographical education, there is plenty of room, and a great deal of need, to bring a stronger emphasis on the sorts of issues that animate critical geographic scholarship into the project—studies of globalization and local resistance, of social and cultural transgression, of the geography of race, class, gender, and sexuality, to name just a few areas. There is no reason to think the culture wars will end with the millennium. It defies reason to think that the age of cultural stupidity, and all the political advantage such an age has handed to conservative know-nothings, is over. So it makes sense for geographers to press home an advantage we were handed more or less by default. The historians were badly bitten in their encounter with conservative culture warriors and ignorant Senators. The final version of the History Standards is considerably watered down in what it asks of students (though much of value does remain). Because the Geography Standards received little public scrutiny, geographers have an opportunity to avenge that loss, to turn a temporary setback for decent scholarship and the goal of critical pedagogy, into a clear victory. This is one battle in the culture wars we could quite possibly win.