This paper points out several differences regarding the features of geographic educations in Japan and the United States, and discusses the characteristics of such education in both countries. The discussion was based on the abstracts from papers presented in annual meetings of National Council for Geographic Education (NCGE) in 2002 and Japanese Association of Professional Geographers (JAPG) in 1999-2002. The following differences were found. First, presenters at NCGE annual meeting comprised a larger number of presenters of specialist in various kinds of geographic fields, not merely geographic educator, compared with presenters at JAPG meetings. And presenters at NCGE meetings were affiliated not only with universities, but also with academic organizations, research institutes, private companies or NPOs. Second, NCGE had a greater number of presentations involving with history, physical geography, remote sensing, online teaching material and professional development than JAPG did. Thirdly, about half of presenters at NCGE annual meeting provided practical resources for geography teaching/learning, such as maps, textbooks, lesson plans, multimedia products and materials related to GIS, whereas major presenters at JAPG meetings were interested in the kind of academic fields represented by teaching theory, education history, educational situations in foreign countries and the geographic cognition of students. Fourthly, more than half of the study areas presented in presentations given at NCGE meeting encompassed foreign countries or a scope that covered a global scale. On the other hand, more than three fourths of the study areas in the JAPG presentations were limited to the local community or the home country. Finally, about a quarter of NCGE presenters focused on education at the college or university level, whereas only a limited percentage of JAPG presenters did the same. It was reasonably supposed that the first point as shown the above was concerned with all the other four points, in other words, the difference of participation of geographers in geographic education resulted in several differences regarding the features of geographic educations between Japan and the United States.
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