GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION

Population programs can have have diverse unintended consequences.  Many couples in China who have lost a child not only face the heartache of loss, but have also lost their economic future since that one child was supposed to support them in their old age.  Some elderly parents have a child, but one that does not financially support them as the cultural norms of the past would have required of the children.  These ‘orphan grandparents‘ are casualties in the changing cultural, demographic, and economic patterns in China.

Religious traditions are interconnected and often share common roots and ancestries.  This stunning infographic is an attempt to visually reconcile these disparate strands of faith into one cohesive whole (the image above is far too small to do it justice, but I tried to show the image at various scales).

Tags: perspective, culture, religion, culture, infographic, diffusion.

This video that I originally found on Upworthy shows that even classic songs of Americana that might seem jingoistic may have had a subversive beginning.  I never knew there was a final verse to this Great Depression era song that references iconic cultural landscapes; know that I’ve heard it I see why it isn’t taught to school kids, but I wish it was.   

Tags:  poverty, place, USA, landscape, culture, music.

This video and article briefly show the reasons behind the current tension between Spain, NATO allies and fellow EU members.  The deeper, underlying issues though are all fundamentally rooted in the complex local political geography.  As an exclave of the UK on a peninsula connected to the Spanish mainland that controls access to the Mediterranean Sea, there is naturally going to be friction over this unusual political configuration. Spain, in what the chief Minister of Gibraltar calls “sabre-rattling,” is flexing its muscles and considering using their border and airspace as a political leverage.  Spain is upset that Gibraltar has created an artificial reef in waters that their fishermen use.  Spanish fisherman have recently condemned the escalating political rhetoic.

Questions to Ponder: Why are both parties politically and culturally invested in this piece of territory?  What challenges are there for a small exclave when neighbors aren’t friendly? How does Spanish and British suprantional connections impact this issue?

Tags: borders, political, territoriality, sovereignty, Spain, Europe, autonomy.

I definitely don’t have the skills to pull off this amazing cake, but I can certainly appreciate the hard work and the amazing teaching tool this cake is (tutorial and recipes for concentrically layered cake here).  Crafts are hardly fluff pieces; my daughter last year had to create a craft representing the inner core, outer core mantle and crust.  She loved working with fruits of various sizes (blueberry was the inner core, followed by strawberry, kiwi and orange with the peel) but the lesson stayed because of the visual and tactile connection that she had with the project.   

Tags: physical, fun, art, K12.

At the NCGE this week, I was pleased to hear a presentation from Alexander Murphy, a giant in the academic world.  He shared this interactive map from Derek Watkins, which is the best map I’ve ever seen to teach global population distribution patterns.  It is removed all extraneous information and allows the user to focus on the areas of heavy settlement and limited population.  The map can show regions that are settled at densities from 15 to 500 people per square mile; the changes at various densities are visually staggering and powerfully telling.  I’ve shared some other maps that would work very nicely together with this in a lesson on global population settlement patterns.  

Tags: density, population,  visualization, mapping.