Dear Teacher

Dear Teacher,

Geography 101 is a course that’s all about the connections that exist throughout the world. The main learning goals, while simple, all involve the students learning about and understanding why and how nations interact, and what those interactions mean for the people that reside within them. The first learning goal is that, when students look at a map, they are able to dig deeper and truly analyze it. Students should be able to recognize the bias that every map carries. Next, after completing this course, students should be able to identify and elaborate on the spatial relationships between various human-related phenomena (culture, politics, etc). The third learning goal of Geography 101 is that students will be able to analyze current events from the perspective of a geographer, by taking connections/relationships and the transfer of power into mind. The fourth and final learning goal is relatively simple - the course will have done its job if students have a deeper understanding of globalization itself. The overall objective of this course is to introduce students to the concept of thinking globally.

The blog posts that we created throughout the semester served as a way to allow us to think critically about the concepts that we were learning. When a student is pushed to form their own opinion about a topic and support those ideas, they must first have a comprehensive understanding of the topic in order develop their own argument. The blog posts served as a way to solidify knowledge and allow students to develop both writing and critical reading skills. Each of the blog post focused on a different topic that was addressed throughout the course, and the prompt could be directly related back to the main theme of that unit. Also, as the course progressed, the topics gradually built on each other in order to create a final, culminating blog post that indirectly forced the student to address all aspects of the course. Additionally, the blog posts were a means of reiterating and applying the knowledge we’ve digested from the course, and tasked us with being able to communicate the content in a way that a general audience would be able to understand. Writing blog posts on the topics we covered allowed us to develop our own arguments based on the sources we’ve accumulated and analyzing their content as well as building from the foundation of material we studied during the course. Overall, the blog posts were a way to experience a real-world application of our geography knowledge, as well as contextualize a lot of the material we’ve learned by honing in on a smaller part of the larger concepts.

The five tags we selected were maps, globalization, capitalism, externalities, and solutions. While many of our tags were connected to the broad ideas of each blog post instruction, we had a system for choosing these ones specifically. First, we all put the main idea of each of our four blog posts on the board. After all twenty-four of our topics were on the board, we looked for ways to connect the variety of posts we wrote. As we came across a tag that was applicable to a few posts, we wrote that word on the board and crossed out the blog posts we would be able to tag with that word. Eventually, we had our five tags that could connect our posts together and no blog topics left on the board. This was an effective tagging system in the sense that we were able to find tags that connected every post in at least one way, but we also found tags that cover the curriculum of the course. Maps, globalization, and capitalism are three main concepts we discussed throughout the semester while externalities and solutions help assess and provide further ideas.

During our semester in Geography 101, we learned a multitude of things, as explained above, and we expressed our understanding of the material through journal entries and blog posts. We found that presenting the information we learned in a manner that explains it to others not only informs others but can help us further our understanding. With those ideas in mind, the activity chosen for this project is to create a booklet that identifies a problem or idea discussed in the blog posts. Each student should make their own booklet based on an idea or problem they found particularly convincing. As you can see from our assignment, creating a booklet will help further each student’s understanding of the material, and most importantly, they will come up with ways to help raise awareness of the idea or prevent problem in their own lives. We hope that using visual components and finding their own evidence to compile a booklet will help them become passionate about geography and globalization.

Throughout the semester, Geography 101 has exposed us to fundamental issues and concepts relating to human geography. By including our work that we’ve done throughout the semester on our website, we hope that it will give you a solid understanding of globalization and, overall, of human geography. Our website contains five different tags (listed under the section “labels:” capitalism, externalities, globalization, maps, and solutions. Within these tags, there are several academic blog posts that relates to them. We hope you enjoy reading and learning from them!