Teaching Geography: Workshop 6
Readings for Workshop 6
The following material comes from Chapter 4 of Geography for Life. You may read it here or in its complete form in your text. For additional readings, go to Resources.
The National Geography Standards for Workshop 6
The national geography standards highlighted in this workshop include Standards 2, 4, 10, 11, 12, and 16. As you read, be thinking about how the standards apply in lessons you may have taught.
Standard 2: How to use mental maps to organize information about people, places, and environments in a spatial context.
To be geographically informed, a person must keep in mind a lot of information about people, places, and environments, and must be able to organize this information in the appropriate spatial contexts. A very effective way of doing this is to create and use what can be called "mental maps." Such a map is an individual's internalized representation of some aspect or aspects of Earth's surface. It represents what the person knows about the locations and characteristics of places at a variety of scales (local to global), from the layout of the student's bedroom to the distribution of oceans and continents on the surface of the Earth. These maps in the mind provide students with an essential means of making sense of the world, and of storing and recalling information about the shapes and patterns of the physical and human features of Earth. Learning how to create and use mental maps, therefore, is a fundamental part of the process of becoming geographically informed.
Mental maps have several distinguishing characteristics:
- Mental maps are personal and idiosyncratic and are usually a mixture of both objective knowledge and subjective perceptions. They contain objective and precise knowledge about the location of geographic features such as continents, countries, cities, mountain ranges, and oceans. They also contain more subjective and less precise information, such as impressions of places, rough estimates of relative size, shape, and location, and a general sense of certain connections between places, as well as priorities that reflect the mapmaker's own predilections.
- Mental maps are used in some form by all people throughout their lives. Such maps enable people to know what routes to take when traveling, comprehend what others say or write about various places, and develop an understanding of the world.
- Mental maps represent ever-changing summaries of spatial knowledge and serve as indicators of how well people know the spatial characteristics of places. People develop and refine their mental maps both through personal experience and through learning from teachers and the media. They refine at least some of their maps to ever-higher levels of completeness and accuracy, and they continue to add information so that the maps reflect a growing understanding of a changing world. Critical geographic observation is essential to this development and refinement process, because mental maps reflect people's skill in observing and thinking about the world in spatial terms (and have nothing to do with their ability to draw).
As students read, hear, observe, and think more about the world around them, they can add more detail and structure to their maps. As students get older, their mental maps accumulate multiple layers of useful information, and this growth in complexity and utility can provide them with a sense of satisfaction as more places and events in the world can be placed into meaningful spatial contexts.
If geography is to be useful in creating a framework for understanding the world—past, present, and future—then coherent mental maps must take shape and become increasingly refined as students progress through their school years. Students should be encouraged to develop and update their mental maps to ensure that they continue to have essential knowledge of place location, place characteristics, and other information that will assist them in personal decision-making and in establishing a broad-based perception of Earth from a local to a global perspective. In addition, they need to understand that developing mental maps is a basic skill for everyone who wants to engage in a lifetime of geographic understanding.
Standard 4: The physical and human characteristics of places.
People's lives are grounded in particular places. We come from a place, we live in a place, and we preserve and exhibit fierce pride over places. Our sense of self is intimately entwined with that of place. Who we are is often inseparable from where we are. Places are human creations and the geographically informed person must understand the genesis, evolution, and meaning of places.
Places are parts of Earth's space, large or small, that have been endowed with meaning by humans. They include continents, islands, countries, regions, states, cities, neighborhoods, villages, rural areas, and uninhabited areas. They usually have names and boundaries. Each place possesses a distinctive set of tangible and intangible characteristics that helps to distinguish it from other places. Places are characterized by their physical and human properties. Their physical characteristics include climate, landforms, soils, hydrology, vegetation, and animal life. Their human characteristics include language, religion, political systems, economic systems, population distribution, and quality of life.
Places change over time as both physical and human processes operate to modify Earth's surface. Few places remain unchanged for long and these changes have a wide range of consequences. As knowledge, ideologies, values, resources, and technologies change, people make place-altering decisions about how to use land, how to organize society, and ways in which to relate (such as economically or politically) to nearby and distant places. Out of these processes emerge new places, with existing places being reorganized and expanded, other places declining, and some places disappearing. Places change in size and complexity and in economic, political, and cultural importance as networks of relationships between places are altered through population expansion, the rise and fall of empires, changes in climate and other physical systems, and changes in transportation and communication technologies. A place can be dramatically altered by events both near and far.
Knowing how and why places change enables people to understand the need for knowledgeable and collaborative decision-making about where to locate schools, factories, and other things and how to make wise use of features of the physical environment such as soil, air, water, and vegetation. Knowing the physical and human characteristics of their own places influences how people think about who they are, because their identity is inextricably bound up with their place in life and the world. Personal identity, community identity, and national identity are rooted in place and attachment to place. Knowing about other places influences how people understand other peoples, cultures, and regions of the world. Knowledge of places at all scales, local to global, is incorporated into people's mental maps of the world.
Students need an understanding of why places are the way they are, because it can enrich their own sense of identity with a particular place and enable them to comprehend and appreciate both the similarities and differences of places around their own community, state, country, and planet.
Standard 10: The characteristics, distribution, and complexity of Earth's cultural mosaics.
Culture is a complex, multifaceted concept. It is a term used to cover the social structure, languages, belief systems, institutions, technology, art, foods, and traditions of particular groups of humans. The term is used to define each group's way of life and its own view of itself and of other groups, as well as to define the material goods it creates and uses, the skills it has developed, and the behaviors it transmits to each successive generation.
The human world is composed of culture groups, each of which has its distinctive way of life as reflected in the group's land-use practices, economic activities, organization and layout of settlements, attitudes toward the role of women in society, education system, and observance of traditional customs and holidays. These ways of life result in landscapes and regions with a distinctive appearance. Landscapes often overlap, thus forming elaborate mosaics of peoples and places.
These cultural mosaics can be approached from a variety of spatial scales. At one scale, for example, Western Europe's inhabitants can be seen as a single culture group; at another scale they consist of distinctive national culture groups (e.g., the French and the Spanish); and at yet another scale each national culture group can be subdivided into smaller, regionally clustered culture groups (e.g., the Flemings and Walloons in Belgium).
As Earth evolves into an increasingly interdependent world in which different culture groups come into contact more than ever before, it becomes more important that people have an understanding of the nature, complexity, and spatial distribution of cultural mosaics.
Given the complexity of culture, it is often useful—especially when studying the subject from a geographic point of view—to focus on the languages, beliefs, institutions, and technologies that are characteristic of a culture. The geographically informed person, therefore, is an individual who has a thorough grasp of the nature and distribution of culture groups.
Language both represents and reflects many aspects of a culture. It stands as an important symbol of culture. It is seen as a sign of the unity of a particular culture group. It can be analyzed—in terms of vocabulary and structure— for clues about the values and beliefs of a culture group. Language is also a visible marker that provides a way of tracing the history of a culture. The complex and often tense relations between French-speaking and English-speaking people in Quebec illustrate and reflect the importance of language to culture groups and also the value of studying the geography of language.
Beliefs include religion, customs, values, attitudes, ideals, and world views. A person's point of view on issues is influenced by cultural beliefs, which in turn influence decisions about resources, land use, settlement patterns, and a host of other geographically important concerns. The complicated and often difficult relations of Hindus and Muslims in India demonstrate how the spatial organization of a country can be shaped by the geography of the region.
Institutions shape the ways in which people organize the world around them; for example, sets of laws, educational systems, political arrangements, and the structure of the family shape a culture region. The Mormon culture region of the western United States shows how institutions are embodied in a distinctive place, demarcating it and influencing practically every aspect of daily life.
Technology includes the tools and skills a group of people use to satisfy their needs and wants. Levels of technology range from the simple tools used by hunters and gatherers to the most complex machines and information systems used in modern industrial societies. Technologies can be usefully understood as either hardware, the tools themselves, or software, the skilled ways in which a society uses tools. The Amish of south-central Pennsylvania have created a distinctive landscape that is simultaneously an expression of technology, institutions, beliefs, and language.
Whatever characteristic of culture is considered, it is clear that the mosaics of Earth's cultural landscapes are not static. Culture changes as a result of a variety of human processes, such as migration and the spread (diffusion) of new cultural traits—language, music, and technology—to existing culture groups. The processes of cultural change accelerate with improvements in transportation and communication. Each culture in the world has borrowed attributes from other cultures whether knowingly or not, willingly or not.
Students should be exposed to a rich appreciation of the nature of culture so they can understand the ways in which people choose to live in different regions of the world. Such an understanding will enable them to appreciate the role culture plays in the spatial organization of modern society. Rivalry and tension between cultures contribute much to world conflict. As members of a multicultural society in a multicultural world, students must understand the diverse spatial expressions of culture.
Standard 11: The patterns and networks of economic interdependence on Earth's surface.
Resources are unevenly scattered across the surface of Earth, and no country has all of the resources it needs to survive and grow. Thus each country must trade with others, and Earth is a world of increasing global economic interdependence. Accordingly, the geographically informed person understands the spatial organization of economic, transportation, and communication systems, which produce and exchange the great variety of commodities—raw materials, manufactured goods, capital, and services—that constitute the global economy.
The spatial dimensions of economic activity and global interdependence are visible everywhere. Trucks haul frozen vegetables to markets hundreds of miles from growing areas and processing plants. Airplanes move large numbers of business passengers or vacationers. Highways, especially in developed countries, carry the cars of many commuters, tourists, and other travelers. The labels on products sold in American supermarkets typically identify the products as coming from other U.S. states and from other countries.
The spatial dimensions of economic activity are more and more complex. For example, petroleum is shipped from Southwest Asia, Africa, and Latin America to major energy-importing regions such as the United States, Japan, and Western Europe. Raw materials and food from tropical areas are exchanged for the processed or fabricated products of the mid-latitude developed countries. Components for vehicles and electronics equipment are made in Japan and the United States, shipped to South Korea and Mexico for partial assembly, returned to Japan and the United States for final assembly into finished products, then shipped all over the world.
Economic activities depend upon capital, resources, power supplies, labor, information, and land. The spatial patterns of industrial labor systems have changed over time. In much of Western Europe, for example, small-scale and spatially dispersed cottage industry was displaced by large-scale and concentrated factory industry after 1760. This change caused rural emigration, the growth of cities, and changes in gender and age roles. The factory has now been replaced by the office as the principal workplace in developed countries. In turn, telecommunications are diminishing the need for a person's physical presence in an office. Economic, social, and therefore spatial relationships change continuously.
The world economy has core areas where the availability of advanced technology and investment capital are central to economic development. In addition, it has semi-peripheries where lesser amounts of value are added to industry or agriculture, and peripheries where resource extraction or basic export agriculture are dominant. Local and world economies intermesh to create networks, movement patterns, transportation routes, market areas, and hinterlands.
In the developed countries of the world's core areas, business leaders are concerned with such issues as accessibility, connectivity, location, networks, functional regions, and spatial efficiency: factors that play an essential role in economic development and also reflect the spatial and economic interdependence of places on Earth.
In developing countries, such as Bangladesh and Guatemala, economic activities tend to be at a more basic level, with a substantial proportion of the population being engaged in the production of food and raw materials. Nonetheless, systems of interdependence have developed at the local, regional, and national levels. Subsistence farming often exists side by side with commercial agriculture. In China, for example, a government-regulated farming system provides for structured production and tight economic links of the rural population to nearby cities. In Latin America and Africa, rural people are leaving the land and migrating to large cities, in part to search for jobs and economic prosperity and in part as a response to overpopulation in marginal agricultural regions. Another important trend is industrialized countries continuing to export their labor-intensive processing and fabrication to developing countries. The recipient countries also profit from the arrangement financially but at a social price. The arrangement can put great strains on centuries-old societal structures in the recipient countries.
As world population grows, as energy costs increase, as time becomes more valuable, and as resources become depleted or discovered, societies need economic systems that are more efficient and responsive. It is particularly important, therefore, for students to understand world patterns and networks of economic interdependence and to realize that traditional patterns of trade, human migration, and cultural and political alliances are being altered as a consequence of global interdependence.
Standard 12: The processes, patterns, and functions of human settlement.
People seldom live in isolation. Most reside in settlements, which vary greatly in size, composition, location, arrangement, and function. These organized groupings of human habitation are the focus of most aspects of human life: economic activities, transportation systems, communications media, political and administrative systems, culture and entertainment. Therefore, to be geographically competent—to appreciate the significance of geography's central theme that Earth is the home of people—a person must understand settlement processes and functions and the patterns of settlements across Earth's surface.
Settlements exercise a powerful influence in shaping the world's different cultural, political, and economic systems. They reflect the values of cultural groups and the kinds of political structure and economic activity engaged in by a society. Accordingly, the patterns of settlement across Earth's surface differ markedly from region to region and place to place. Of great importance to human existence, therefore, are the spatial relationships between settlements of different sizes: their spacing, their arrangement, their functional differences, and their economic specialties. These spatial relationships are shaped by trade and the movements of raw materials, finished products, people, and ideas.
Cities, the largest and densest human settlements, are the nodes of human society. Almost half of the world's people now live in cities, and the proportion is even higher in the developed regions of the world. In the United States, more than three-quarters of the people live in urban areas. More than two-thirds of the people of Europe, Russia, Japan, and Australia live in such areas.
Cities throughout the world are growing rapidly, but none so rapidly as those in developing regions. For example, the ten largest cities in the world in the year 2000 will include such Latin American cities as São Paulo and Mexico City. In some regions of the world there are concentrations of interconnected cities and urban areas, which are known as megalopoli. In Japan, the three adjacent and continuous cities of Tokyo-Kawasaki-Yokohama make up such a megalopolis. In Germany there is another, consisting of the Rhine River Valley and the cities of Essen, Düsseldorf, Dortmund, and Wuppertal. The corridor from Boston to Washington, D.C., is also a megalopolis (sometimes called "Megalopolis" because it was the first one to be designated).
Cities are not the same all over the world. North American cities, for example, differ from European cities in shape and size, density of population, transportation networks, and the patterns in which people live and work within the city. The same contrast is true of cities in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. For example, in North American cities wealthy people tend to live in the outskirts or suburban areas, whereas lower-income residents tend to live in inner-city areas. In Latin America the spatial pattern is reversed: wealthy people live close to the city centers and poor people live in slums or barrios found at the edges of urban areas.
In North America, Europe, and Japan urban areas are linked to one another by well-integrated, efficient, and reliable transportation and communications systems. In these regions, even the smallest villages are linked in a web of trade, transportation, and communication networks. In contrast, in developing regions such as Latin America and Southeast Asia, a single primate city often dominates the life of the country. A primate city such as Buenos Aires or Manila is preeminent in its influence on the culture, politics, and economic activities of its country. Nevertheless, in terms of transportation and communications links it may be better connected to the outside world than it is to other regions of the country it serves.
Settlements and the patterns they etch on Earth's surface provide not only data on current economic and social aspects of human existence but also a historical record. Today's settlement patterns, evident on a map, provide information about past settlement patterns and processes, and the boundaries of counties and other political entities indicate how people organized the land as they settled it. In all such cases, the surviving evidence of past settlements can and should be amplified by the students' use of research materials to develop a fuller understanding of how settlements relate to their physical setting over time. It is valuable, for example, to know about life in a German medieval town and the town's relationship to the surrounding countryside; life in a typical North Dakota settlement along a railroad line in the 1890s; and life in the walled city of Xian and the city's importance in north China in the second century B.C.
Students must develop an understanding of the fundamental processes, patterns, and functions of human settlement across Earth's surface, and thereby come to appreciate the spatially ordered ways in which Earth has become the home of people. They need to acquire a working knowledge of such topics as: the nature and functions of cities, the processes that cause cities to grow and decline, how cities are related to their market areas or hinterlands; the patterns of land use and value, population density, housing type, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and age distribution in urban areas; the patterns of change, growth, and decline within urban areas; the process of suburbanization; and how new types of urban nodes develop. Geographers ask these questions to make sense of the distribution and concentration of human populations.
Standard 16: The changes that occur in the meaning, use, distribution, and importance of resources.
A resource is any physical material that constitutes part of Earth and which people need and value. There are three basic resources—land, water, and air—that are essential to human survival. However, any other natural material also becomes a resource if and when it becomes available to humans. The geographically informed person must develop an understanding of this concept and of the changes in the spatial distribution, quantity, and quality of resources on Earth's surface.
Those changes occur because a resource is a cultural concept, with the value attached to any given resource varying from culture to culture and period to period. Value can be expressed in economic or monetary terms, in legal terms (as in the Clean Air Act), in terms of risk assessment, or in terms of ethics (the responsibility to preserve our National Parks for future generations). The value of a resource depends on human needs and the technology available for its extraction and use. Rock oil seeping from rocks in northwestern Pennsylvania was of only minor value as a medicine until a technology was developed in the mid-nineteenth century that enabled it to be refined into a lamp illuminant. Some resources that were once valuable are no longer important. For example, it was the availability of pine tar and tall timber—strategic materials valued by the English navy—that in the seventeenth century helped spur settlement in northern New England, but that region now uses its vegetative cover (and natural beauty) as a different type of resource: for recreation and tourism. Resources, therefore, are the result of people seeing a need and perceiving an opportunity to meet that need.
The quantity and quality of a resource is determined by whether it is a renewable, nonrenewable, or a flow resource. Renewable resources, such as plants and animals, can replenish themselves after they have been used if their physical environment has not been destroyed. If trees are harvested carefully, a new forest will grow to replace the one that was cut. If animals eat grass in a pasture to a certain level, grass will grow again and provide food for animals in the future, as long as the carrying capacity of the land is not exceeded by the pressure of too many animals. Nonrenewable resources, such as minerals and fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas), can be extracted and used only once. Flow resources, such as water, wind, and sunlight, are neither renewable nor nonrenewable because they must be used as, when, and where they occur. The energy in a river can be used to generate electricity, which can be transmitted over great distances. However, that energy must be captured by turbines as the water flows past or it will be lost.
The location of resources influences the distribution of people and their activities on the Earth. People live where they can earn a living. Human migration and settlement are linked to the availability of resources, ranging from fertile soils and supplies of freshwater to deposits of metals or pools of natural gas. The patterns of population distribution that result from the relationship between resources and employment change as needs and technologies change. In Colorado, for example, abandoned mining towns reflect the exhaustion of nonrenewable resources (silver and lead deposits), whereas ski resorts reflect the exploitation of renewable resources (snow and scenery).
Technology changes the ways in which humans appraise resources, and it may modify economic systems and population distributions. Changes in technology bring into play new ranges of resources from Earth's stock. Since the industrial revolution, for example, technology has shifted from waterpower to coal-generated steam to petroleum-powered engines, and different resources and their source locations have become important. The population of the Ruhr Valley in Germany, for example, grew rapidly in response to the new importance of coal and minerals in industrial ventures. Similarly, each innovation in the manufacture of steel brought a new resource to prominence in the United States, and resulted in locational shifts in steel production and population growth.
Demands for resources vary spatially. More resources are used by economically developed countries than by developing countries. For example, the United States uses petroleum at a rate that is five times the world average. As countries develop economically, their demand for resources increases faster than their population grows. The wealth that accompanies economic development enables people to consume more. The consumption of a resource does not necessarily occur where the resource is produced or where the largest reserves of the resource are located. Most of the petroleum produced in Southwest Asia, for example, is consumed in the United States, Europe, and Japan.
Sometimes, users of resources feel insecure when they have to depend on other places to supply them with materials that are so important to their economy and standard of living. This feeling of insecurity can become especially strong if two interdependent countries do not have good political relations, share the same values, or understand each other. In some situations, conflict over resources breaks out into warfare. One factor in Japan's involvement in World War II, for example, was that Japan lacked petroleum resources of its own and coveted oil fields elsewhere in Asia, especially after the United States threatened to cut off its petroleum exports to Japan.
Conflicts over resources are likely to increase as demand increases. Globally, the increase in demand tends to keep pace with the increase in population. More people on Earth means more need for fertilizers, building materials, food, energy, and everything else produced from resources. Accordingly, if the people of the world are to coexist, Earth's resources must be managed to guarantee adequate supplies for everyone. That means reserves of renewable resources need to be sustained at a productive level, new reserves of nonrenewable resources need to be found and exploited, new applications for flow resources need to be developed, and, wherever possible, cost-effective substitutes—especially for nonrenewable resources—need to be developed.
It is essential that students have a solid grasp of the different kinds of resources; of the ways in which humans value and use (and compete over) resources; and of the distribution of resources across Earth's surface.
material is from Geography for Life: The National Geography
Standards, 1994, The Geography Education Standards Project.
with the permission of the National Geographic Society.