Geography of North America: Activities for Large Classes

This set of activities is designed to bring geography to life in an introductory college course on the geography of North America. Instructors can swap about 1/3 of the time typically used in lectures and use these activities to promote spatial thinking and to demonstrate the excitement of working with spatial data to answer geo- graphic questions. Geographic inquiry is engaging and important, yet too many times, students must wait to take upper division classes to appreciate the discipline’s most stimulating aspects.

For instructors, the question might be How do you overcome the setting and limitations that are typical of large introductory college courses and deliver a great course in geography? The chairs are packed tightly together, desk space is small, and class time is between 50 and 75 minutes. There may be no windows, no natural light, and even limited ventilation. Distributing large maps is not feasible. It would be easy to project notes and images on a screen and lecture, breaking it up with quizzes and exams. Students read textbooks outside class and develop a set of notes for an exam. Even though there are certainly very talented lecturers who engage students in discourse, they may not be letting students discover the points being made in a lecture. This book assumes the following premise: If students can work with data and discover some kind of relationship between variables, they would retain knowledge longer and appreciate the excitement of geographic inquiry.

The activities present geographic data and questions. Students learn to process the data, grapple with possible answers to the questions, compare their answers to real-world outcomes, and ponder the discrepancies. This kind of iterative process is exactly what professional geographers follow when conducting research.

The activities are designed to be completed in class or prior to class, but with a twist: the instructor’s guide includes additional questions for each activity. Students work on those questions during the class time. Instructors can then observe students working on the questions. The activities may be evaluated together or graded by the instructor. For convenience, an answer page is included at the end of each activity. It may be removed from the book, but the students will still have all of the work embedded in the pages as well. If the activity is evaluated in class, then the students will be able to add notes to the books to help them prepare for exams.

The topics were developed during an 8-year period of teaching an introductory course entitled The Geography of the United States and Canada at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. Together, the activities include map and image interpretation, location analysis, several topics in physical geography, economic geography, urban geography, and natural hazards. Certainly, there are many more topics worthy of development, but the ones presented here may whet the whistle of students and encourage them to consider upper division courses in geography.