Geographic Literacy Award

2008 Recipient - Linda Gollick

The missing links

Photo courtesy of Linda Gollick

An Ontario high school teacher and the winner of the Canadian Council for Geographic Education’s 2008 Geographic Literacy Award, Gollick (right) believes in stressing the interconnectedness of physical, economic and social systems, both in the classroom and when developing new materials for the Ontario curriculum. When students see the relationship between, say, the clothing they’re wearing and the manufacturing process used to make it, their critical thinking skills sharpen.

“It’s important to identify global issues,” says Gollick, head of the Canadian and world studies department at Toronto’s Loretto College School and Ontario coordinator for The Great Canadian Geography Challenge for the past 15 years. “But we also need to relate these issues to a local level.” This helps students understand geography and perhaps find a place within it.

— Dan Rubinstein