What do you do after you’ve already been named the best in the state?

For Amy Brown, a geography teacher at Plymouth Community Intermediate School, the answer was to go national.

Brown traveled to Washington, D.C., last summer as a guest of the National Geographic Society. She and 57 other geography teachers from around the country, plus Puerto Rico and Canada, spent a week developing new geography curriculum that will be shared with educators nationwide.

The teachers and their National Geographic Society hosts focused on new initiatives for understanding Europe.

“Europe is very interesting right now, erasing borders as they develop into the European Union,” Brown said. “They’re becoming more like the United States in some ways and at the same time some are separating by national identity. It’s a curious dichotomy of unifying and separating simultaneously.”

As part of the session, Brown and others teachers met with National Geographic representatives from every nation in Europe and spent an evening exploring each nation’s heritage in depth.

Trained as a history teacher, Brown switched to geography right out of college when her job opened at PCIS. She is now in her 11th year of teaching geography at the middle school.

The Massachusetts Council for Social Studies recognized Brown for her efforts in 2007 with the John Reilly Outstanding Geography Teacher of the Year award.

The National Geographic Society has been actively working with educators to improve curriculum on a grass roots level for more than two decades. Each state has its own Geography Alliance, which sends teachers to conferences like the session Brown attended on European studies in Washington.

The group attended lectures and participated in discussions aimed at bringing classroom studies up to date. Brown will meet with Geography Alliance teachers from other New England states during the school year to fine-tune a program of supplemental studies that each will eventually recommend to other teachers in their states.

The curriculum continues to evolve beyond the summer conference with online updates on events like the Russian occupation of Georgia.

Brown said the curriculum will enhance any geography program, because it addresses information simply unavailable even in the best textbooks. Plymouth, for example, uses a textbook called Geography Alive! that discusses the changing borders and national identities in Europe, but could not have foreseen the Russian/Georgian hostilities.

“Even though the texts are very current, they can only be so up to date,” she said.

Brown’s class is currently studying the Americas, but will get an up-to-the minute look at Europe after Thanksgiving.