Module III: Landforms and Culture

Are we reaching a time when our essential landforms stop being part of the land?

The Week Three module was interesting to me because I can relate, albeit loosely, to the idea of being formed by the landscape around me. My parents raised my sister and me to have a constant awareness of the landscape around us. Knowing the names of mountains, rivers, animals, and plants was a "game" we played whenever we were out. Knowing about the natural world around us was something we did automatically, and even now I find myself testing myself on the names of the features and organisms around me in my new home-Alaska. Because of that background, I was especially captivated by the double names for famous mountains presented in Module III: Landform Forces. I spent a great deal of time on Wikipedia, looking up well-known landforms and learning the history, legends, and stories behind them. I shared a few of the local or native names for famous landforms with my students, and found many of them to be equally interested. I would like to use these examples of double names to introduce students to the idea of classification later in the year. Trying to work amongst varying  languages, cultures and customs makes effective communication more difficult, and seems to be a primary stumbling block in cross-cultural scientific learning and sharing. As we explore the different names for both landforms and organisms in Alaska and around the world, students will get a clear idea of why a standardized form of scientific naming is so vital.

I knew just what Cheryl meant when she described going to college in ID, and realizing not everywhere had glaciers, volcanoes, and earthquakes. I was equally amazed by our family vacations when I was young. Growing up in Colorado, I had no idea that there were places where you couldn’t tell the direction from the mountains on the horizon, or where summer and fall were as green as spring instead of fading to dusty brown. I was amazed by the desert in Nevada, and completely in love with the oceans off Florida’s shores. Over the last few years, I’ve been startled and disappointed to learn that several of the students in my classes each year have never traveled outside of the Anchorage bowl. Even more have never been outside of Alaska, and very few have been outside the country-even including Canada! I try to show my students a variety of pictures, movies, and written depictions of places around the world. Google Earth, especially Google Earth 3D will be an invaluable tool as I expose my classes to places outside of Anchorage. Zooming in from a map they are familiar with to focus on a place that they have never seen before will allow them to realize that these are real places, not simply the creation of a director’s fantasy on a movie set, or programming tricks in a video game. Just as Dan said this week in his blog, visual learners especially will benefit from seeing real images of the place I'm describing, rather than just hearing or reading about places as abstract ideas. 

I especially enjoyed Module III because it took a subject I was already familiar with and interested in, and showed me valuable ways to better incorporate landscapes and their influence on cultures into my curriculum-and personal learning! To paraphrase Richard Glenn, the resources I explored as part of this module provide me with several more flashlights.