Geography, History, and How It Makes Us Who We Are – Rocky Mountain High
We are forever connected to the places we visit and live in. They impact almost every facet of who we are. Without place we are nothing.
This September we set out on a field school to Alberta with a question in mind, the driving question of our project: How has the Geography of the West Impacted us? After returning and reflecting I think I finally have the answer to that question. Here’s how I got there.
We kept 4 main ideas in mind on our trip Communication, Listening and speaking to a variety of audiences, The physical environment shapes change politically, socially, and economically, and and process.
We learned about communication and presented our understanding of it most through our books. They were created throughout the trip and added to after every stop. In my book, there is a reflection on each day and how the location relates to our project. It uses communication because it conveys all the learning we learned related to humanities. It also includes the videos we made for Maker which you can find here. another way these books show communication is that after we came home we personalized them, to communicate our unique experiences.
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Listening and Speaking to a Variety of Audiences
This was most demonstrated in the interviews we took on the trip. Although these mostly were for Maker the content of them was for Humantites. We interviewed people throughout our trip, to see if the theses we came up with were true or false. They investigated ideas, stereotypes and the tourism of the West and how they were impacted by geography. You can watch my video above.
The physical environment shapes change politically, socially, economically
This was the idea I kept in mind the most. I think that this was deeply embedded in every bit of work we did but it is most obvious in the comic life (see above). Geography is the baseline of existence, life is the way it is because of geography. We can think about geography using the five themes outlined in the comic life. All of them are present in all examples you just have to look hard enough. For example, geography impacts the economics of the West because of the CPR. The CPR would not be where it is without the Rockies because it needed to be planned out to go a certain route through them. Many small towns now rely on tourists coming to learn about the history..
Process
This one is all about reflection and asking questions. Listening is an important skill on these trips (which many of my classmates still can’t grasp) so that we can later reflect. Reflection is when the real learning happens when we begin to form our own opinions and ideas about a topic. This blog post is an example of that. I went out and learned so much on my trip but as I write this the true MEANING of what I learned sinks in. We should look at the things we learned from many different angles, like critical creative and reflective ones. I showed critical thinking with the book and creativity with the investigative video. Process is probably the most visible idea in any project because it is what you learned and how you got there.
All of this (the ideas, the trip and personal reflection), has led me to my answer to the driving question. For a reminder, the Driving question was How has the Geography of the West Impacted us?
The geography of the West impacts us because it is the reason we are where we are. The Rocky Mountains connected BC to Canada and without that, we wouldn’t even be Canadian Citizens. The CPR is an important part of Canadian history because it is still relevant today because it still keeps people connected, through the historical sites, the ideas it brought and the country it connected. Everything we see is connected to geography, from where our school is to our hobbies, we just have to open our eyes and look.
