Monday, January 26, 2015

Los Mexicanos tratando de ubicar paises en Europa

I am going to confess to a bias: I believe that people in the United States often know very little about what exists beyond its borders. I mainly think of this as a problem of nationalism. So I was interested to see a piece on Buzzfeed where Americans Try To Place European Countries On A Map. Hilarious and sad. I was discussing it on Facebook and became curious about how people here in Mexico would do with that challenge. I was 100% confident that they would do better than people from the United States. I was wrong. See below.  

After my little exercise, I decided to look into geographic literacy and found that past researchers have found that among youth, the United States does have the lowest level of geographic knowledge, except for Mexico. "The National Geographic–Roper 2002 Global Geographic Literacy Survey polled more than 3,000 18- to 24-year-olds in Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Sweden and the United States. Sweden scored highest; Mexico, lowest. The U.S. was next to last." For more information, check out this link: Survey Reveals Geographic Illiteracy

I am sorry Mexico. You know I love you. This just motivates me to want to be part of internationalizing education here. 

 Australia is not on this map.

 China got confused quite a bit with Turkey
 The Middle East is not actually across the water from Italy.



 In fairness, it could be an age cohort issue. A lot of changes have happened on maps because of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
 Almost everyone knew where Italy was located. Maybe if more countries were shaped like clothing/footwear.







 Japan is not actually just below Greece.












What do you think would help Mexicans in gaining geographic literacy?

Ah. In case you want to see the answers, here you go:

Map of Europe!