Growing up in South Carolina, my first experience with geography in the classroom was learning about our state’s landform regions. These six regions, ranging from the Coastal Zone and Outer Coastal Plain to the Piedmont and Blue Ridge, gave me a way to organize and make sense of all the places around me. I knew that I lived in the Sandhills because of the sandy soil and abundance of pine trees; we passed through vast flat fields of cotton, corn, or soybeans to visit my grandmother in the Inner Coastal Plain; and family trips to the beach allowed me to smell the salty air near the marshes of the Coastal Zone. I could name and group the types of places I had (and would) experience.
When I learned to teach, I struggled with geography. Yi-Fu Tuan (1991) says that geography is the study of the earth as home to people. But how do you teach that? While these landform regions remained, I struggled to find an effective strategy to teach grouping similar places into regions and to explain why this mattered. When teaching world geography, are local landform regions and geographies any longer relevant?
Teaching Advanced Placement Human Geography pushed me to find support from groups like the SC Geographic Alliance. I attended workshops and summer institutes and read recommended books and articles, which challenged me to think like a geographer. I had to think about space and distances, the movement of people and ideas from one location to another, and how physical and human characteristics blend to help us define “places.” Using these skills – these ways of thinking – helped ignite and direct my curiosity about the world. I could then create a classroom where we would work to wonder about the world and learn more about it through maps, spatial thinking, and consideration of human-environment interactions.
When I joined the staff of the SC Geographic Alliance, one of my first big tasks was to help identify a geographer to work on the updates to the Atlas of South Carolina. This resource has helped me as a teacher by consolidating the information I learned as a student and building on it. Not only were there landform regions, but there were geographic regions, and even barbecue regions – different parts of the state where different barbecue sauces were dominant! Many of my students had moved to the state from other parts of the world, including Michigan and Malaysia. The Atlas introduced them to their new home while also giving them examples of how to organize and consider the world through a spatial lens. Updating this atlas based on new census data, events such as earthquakes or hurricanes, and teacher feedback would help our new editorial team continue the legacy of this resource.
The editorial team grew to include our chief editor, Dr. Austin Crane, our colleague, a climate scientist and Rhodes Scholar, Jory Flemming, and me. We partnered with cartographer Elbie Bentley, who had worked on the previous edition and leaned on the research of geographers, historians, scientists, and residents across South Carolina to update this resource and ensure its continued impact in classrooms across the state. We focused on the current state social studies standards to include meaningful content and provide opportunities for inquiry, allowing students to practice their geography skills and learn more about the state.
Each page varied in needs. The page indicates the location of South Carolina relative to the United States, including latitude and longitude? Easy. Creating a new page that describes the military landscape of the state? That took thought. What metrics would we use? What data was best communicated spatially? Were there distributions and patterns that were significant? What colors or symbols would we use to communicate all of this? Was the text approachable to students at multiple reading levels? Where could we add pictures or graphs?
Social studies standards were helpful for identifying content, both for narrowing down our state’s broad history and geography and for ensuring that the atlas would remain a relevant classroom resource. For example, a newly requested page dedicated to the Civil Rights Era identified sites associated with events explicitly mentioned in the 2019 standards, including the Orangeburg Massacre and the Briggs v. Elliott court case. Other pages, like the map of college football conferences, had no specific standard attached, but were kept because they were engaging sources of student inquiry, facilitating the use of geography skills to help students understand how places are connected to (and distinct from) other places.
As editors, we recognized that limited space on the page would limit the stories we could tell. When it comes to cartography, Mark Monmonier (2018) notes that the “fog of detail” must be avoided. Too much information clouds the page, so the mapmaker must choose what to omit to preserve particular stories. We worked to include more maps to tell more stories and share more experiences from South Carolina. Ultimately, space on the page and on the pages of the atlas prevailed. Knowing this, we leave readers on the final page with a call to action, asking students to consider places and parts of the state they can map, using the atlas’s content and even the maps themselves as inspiration. Geography is a way to empower our students to understand the world and tell their own stories of it, to highlight the places that are meaningful to them, and to wrestle – as we had – with the process of mapmaking.
South Carolina’s geography is bigger than the names and descriptions of its landform regions. Understanding geography, including landform regions, helps students to understand the world around them, including their local environment and extending to the entire globe, to people and places, and homes everywhere. As geographers, educators, and South Carolinians, we hope that the third edition of the Atlas of South Carolina will help teachers and students find and understand meaningful content about the state and create opportunities to ask and answer questions about the places we call home.
The Atlas of South Carolina is available from the University of South Carolina Press, either for purchase or as a free open educational resource online.
References:
Crane, A., Mewborne, M., & Fleming, J. (2025). Atlas of South Carolina, 3rd ed. University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, SC. https://uscpress.com/Atlas-of-South-Carolina-third-edition
Monmonier, M. (2018). How to Lie with Maps, 3rd ed. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo27400568.html
Tuan, Y.-F. (1991). A View of Geography. Geographical Review, 81(1), 99–107. https://doi.org/10.2307/215179
Michael Mewborne is a research associate in the Geography Department at the University of South Carolina where he studies geography education. As director of the South Carolina Geographic Alliance, he works with educators across the state to promote geography education through training sessions, the curation and creation of materials, and the facilitation of professional networks to connect educators and geographers.