Education - Education and Outreach Projects

Summary of the Project:

The State of Maryland has developed a package of resources and lesson plans to support high school social studies and science teachers in integrating topics related to growth and development within the regular curriculum. Government, policy and planning, economics, geography, and a myriad of environmental issues are encompassed with the Smart Growth concept, and Smart Growth provides a rich source of topics for classroom investigations.

The goal of the Teachers Resource Guide is to facilitate the involvement of teachers and students in authentic government and environmental issues. This guide includes a discussion of issues-based instruction; sample lesson plans; additional resource materials; and examples of action or service learning projects. It is accompanied by a website that contains the text of this guide, an electronic copy of Picture Maryland, as well as the data, maps, and other resources referenced in each lesson.

Partial funding for this project from the Rauch Foundation has been administered by the National Center for Smart Growth.

For more information, contact:
Growth and Resource Conservation Division
Maryland Department of Natural Resources
Tawes State Office Building, E2
Annapolis, MD 21401
(410) 260-8710
http://www.dnr.state.md.us/education/growfromhere/Home.htm

Summary of the Project:

To help the students, land use decision-makers and the general public better understand Maryland’s Smart Growth initiative, the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education at the University of Maryland collaborated with several state agencies (the Governor’s Office of Smart Growth, the Department of Planning, the Department of Natural Resources, the Department of Transportation, and the Department of Housing and Community Development) and the National Geographic Society to jointly develop a first-of-its-kind set of National Geographic Maryland Smart Growth maps.

These two-sided maps depict on side one the trends that led to the creation of the Smart Growth and Neighborhood Conservation initiative in 1997 and, on side two, the major elements of the Smart Growth initiative. This valuable educational product is being distributed to public and private schools, libraries and elsewhere to expand understanding of geography, environmental, natural resource and growth issues. PDFs of the map can be found on the Maryland Department of Planning's website.

To obtain paper copies, contact:

The Maryland Department of Planning at (410)767-4997