Sarah and Bob Bednarz will speak on Setting New Priorities to Address Global Challenges
The title of the keynote from Sarah and Bob Bednarz is “Research in Geography Education: Setting New Priorities to Address Global Challenges”. Download the presentation abstract
Sarah Witham Bednarz is a professor emerita of geography and past president of the American Association of Geographers. Bednarz was principal investigator on two major curriculum and educational research projects, 
Mission Geography (NASA) and Advancing Geospatial Skills in Geography and Spatial Sciences (AGSSS); co-authored the national geography standards, Geography for Life (1994 and 2012); participated in the National Research Council Learning to Think Spatially project, and helped to develop the National Assessment of Educational Performance (NAEP) framework in geography. Dr. Bednarz holds a University Professorship for Teaching Excellence and received the George J. Miller Award from the National Council for Geographic Education in 2005 and the Gilbert H. Grosvenor Honors for Geographic Education from the Association of American Geographers in 2007. Recently she co-chaired the Geography Education Research Committee (GERC) of the 21st Century Road Map for 21st Century Geography Education Project with Niem Huynh and Susan Heffron. She has long been interested in the intersection of teaching and learning geospatial technologies and spatial and geographic thinking, the result of her first career as a middle and high school geography teacher. Sarah and her husband, Robert, now live in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Robert Bednarz is emeritus professor of geography at Texas A&M University. His research has focused on spatial thinking, the impact of using 
geo-spatial technologies on spatial-thinking skills, assessment of spatial-thinking skills, and the implementation of geo-spatial technologies in science and geoscience curricula. He served as president of the National Council for Geographic Education and as chair of the AAG’s Geography Education Specialty Group. He has directed or co-directed funded projects to infuse geo-spatial technologies into the K-12 curriculum. He contributed strategies and materials for two NASA-sponsored programs, Mission Geography and GeoEarthKAM. He also served as co-PI of an NSF project, AGSSS: Advancing Geospatial Skills in Science and Social Science. These recent projects reflect more than 20 years of working with K-12 teachers to enhance their knowledge, skills, and strategies. Dr. Bednarz has significant editorial experience, serving as editor of the Journal of Geography from 1987 to 1997 and presently as North American editor of the Journal of Geography in Higher Education. In addition to his professional publications, he has also authored several middle and high school textbooks.
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