In 1995, a teacher-training institute was launched through a community-wide collaborative effort that included local social studies teachers, the University of Houston-Clear Lake (UHCL), NASA, and the Texas Alliance for Geographic Education/National Geographic Society. The Geography Institute for Teachers: Global and Environmental Geography with Space-Age Technology, conducted at UHCL, was designed to train teachers in the interpretation and instructional use of space shuttle photography along with teaching strategies pertaining to the development of study skills and critical thinking to improve geographic literacy. The Geography Institute was sponsored by the Environmental Institute of Houston, Institute for Space Systems Operations, Texas Alliance for Geographic Education/National Geographic Society, Lockheed-Martin, NASA, UHCL, and School of Education at UHCL.

A subcommittee was formed to develop the purposes and design of the Geography Institute. The subcommittee decided to incorporate research-based principles and strategies aimed at positively addressing specific problems for learning and teaching social studies content (i.e., geography) with shuttle photographs. Because students frequently report that social studies is "boring" (Cuban, 1991; Downey & Levstik, 1989; Goodlad, 1984), generating interest for learning about Earth was a major goal of the Institute. The subcommittee believed that using the shuttle photographs before, during, and after reading would stimulate students to actively engage in the learning process. They also believed that the shuttle photographs, along with effective teacher questioning strategies, could set the stage for students to read, conduct research, develop critical thinking, and write more critically and creatively about global and environmental geographic issues (See Manzo & Manzo, 1996; McKenna & Robinson, 1997).

In order to help students learn how to study and to think critically about geographic phenomena depicted on the shuttle photographs, some of the instructional strategies selected for the teacher training were KWL, concept mapping, and SQR: Summarize, Question, Respond. In addition to these goals, teachers were expected to use shuttle photos, other multimedia resources, and textbook materials to develop their social studies lessons and activities. This goal was grounded on decades of research related to the arguable instructional value of most social studies textbooks (Beck & McKeown, 1991).