Page 159 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

CHAPTER 6 How Can I Teach Geography and Anthropology Powerfully? 131
population concentrations. People continually modify or adapt to natural settings in ways that reveal their cultural values and economic and political circumstances, such as villages that still endure in the desert southwest. Hispanic and Anglo settlers established mines and mineral industries, cattle ranches, and farms in these deserts, relying on manipulation of water resources. Today, contemporary Americans look to the American Southwest for resort and retirement developments, military training and research, and high technology industries.
Geography focuses on understanding how such human-environment relationships develop and what their consequences are for people and the environment. Sub-themes include the role of technology in modifying environments (with attention to pollution and other costs as well as to benefits), environmental hazards (e.g., earthquakes and floods as well as human-induced disasters), the availability of land and natural resources and the limits this places on human possibilities, the purposes pursued and methods used by people to adapt to environments, and the ethical values and cultural attitudes that affect their behavior.
4. Movement: Humans interacting on the earth (relationships between places). Places and regions are connected by movement. Over time, humans have increased their levels of interaction through communication, travel, and foreign exchange. Technology has shrunk space and distance. People travel out of curiosity, and they migrate because of economic or social need, environmental change, or other reasons. Movement can also be traced in physical forces—traveling weather patterns, ocean and wind currents, flowing water, or plate tectonics.
Several sub-themes surround the reasons for movement and the forms that it takes: transportation modes, everyday travel, historical developments, economic reasons for movements, and mass movements of physical systems. Other sub-themes surround global interdependence: the movement of goods, services and ideas across regional, national, and international borders; the development of trade and common markets. Still other sub-themes surround models of human interaction: the reasons why people move (e.g., from rural areas to cities) and issues relating to the size and spacing of urban areas and the relationships between cities and their surrounding regions.
Tied to the geographic sub-theme movement are push and pull factors. Push factors are those factors that drive people to leave their homes. Examples include political and/ or religious persecution, scarcity of land or other natural resources in their current loca- tion, revolutions, and poverty. Pull factors on the other hand, are conditions that attract people to a new place. Among them are promise of religious and/or political freedom, hope for a new life, availability of resources, industry, and potential job opportunities. People weigh the trade-offs associated with push and pull factors before they make deci- sions about moving to a new area.
5. Regions: How they form and change. The basic unit of geographic study is the region, an area that displays unity in terms of selected criteria (e.g., types of agriculture, climate, land forms, vegetation, political boundaries, soils, religions, languages, cultures, or eco- nomic characteristics). Regions may be larger than a continent or smaller than your neighborhood. They may have well-defined boundaries, such as a state or city, or indis- tinct boundaries, such as the Great Plains or the Kalahari Desert.
Sub-themes include uniform regions, functional regions, and cultural diversity. Uniform regions are defined by a common cultural or physical characteristic (e.g., the wheat belt, the Bible Belt, and Latin America). Functional regions are organized around a focal point (e.g., the San Francisco Bay area, a local school district). Understanding regions sharpens appreciation of the diversity that exists in human activities and
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