Lesson Plan: Simulating river life as an early American settler - the 'fall line' cities of the Mid-Atlantic

Students that hate geography are probably used to lessons like this one (no offence to the lesson planner!)

Memorize the 'regions' of Virginia, color in a map, do a worksheet - yada yada yada snooze.

Here's a way to use Google Earth to 'see' Virginia and at the same time learn some real geography. The lesson plan for this lesson (.doc file plus .jpg pictures) can be found here.

In short, geography is about exploring and investigating not just where something is, but also why it's there. In this lesson, students use Google Earth to follow the rivers of the mid-Atlantic region upstream until they reach the 'fall line' (the border between the coastal plain and the Piedmonts which is characterized by waterfalls and rapids). As they do so, they will be virtually travelling through one of the most beautiful sections of the United States and they're encouraged to "stop and smell the flowers" (again, virtually:) Here's some screenshots:

The aim of the lesson is to add a series of placemarks which can be connected to establish the location of the fall line in the mid-Atlantic region of the USA.

Students literally 'cruise' up-river. As they wind through the meanders of the river they pass natural and man-made environments which they are encouraged to explore.

As they do so they encounter the cities and environments of the mid-Atlantic through user-created content. Way more interactive, way better than a worksheet, and way more real.

Journal Article Review:

Article Summary
Tom Dillehay’s article titled “Probing deeper into first American studies” is effectively a review of the most progressive thinking on the first human settlement in the Americas. Dillehay looks at how archaeological, genetic, bioanthropological, as well as geographic evidence are used in conjunction with one another to come up with the hypotheses that we have today about the first peopling of the Americas. There is no clear consensus amongst the scientific community about who came first and from which direction, but the article’s first line does state “[o]f the possible entry routes into the Americas, Beringia, a land bride from Siberia to the interior and coastal areas of Alaska and Northwest Canada is the most viable.” I believe that learning the truth about the initial peopling of the continent (and the world for that matter) is important for geographers. We study how humans co-exist with their environment and how that has changed over time and I think it’s important to have a complete historical record of our existence as homo sapiens. To some extent this research is more historical than geographic, but history is important for geographers to understand; it can be a basis for making geographic decisions. This article is anthropologic in nature (it’s written by a professor of Anthropology) and is mainly concerned with evidence coming from carbon dated archaeological records and genetic DNA analysis, but for me, the overall concept is worth thinking more critically about. Who were the first people to arrive on our continent and when did they come? Was it just one group or many ‘waves’ of migration? In what ways did they settle and use the land? How did they spread across the vast emptiness of the land? Once we know who was first, what does that mean? Are those people entitled to that land forever? Should settlement and land rights be based on a ‘first come – first serve” basis? If not, does that justify colonization even as recent as today? This article has inspired these and similar questions out of me.

Connection to GCU Lecture / Extension Videos
I decided to find an article on this subject after watching the lectures in the first section of GCU 676 about North America and how it can be classified as a region. Lecture #4 of this class focused on the settlement patterns of North America. While I was intrigued by the present day demographics and the migrations of the last few decades, my ears perked up when the presenter mentioned that the jury is still out about who actually came first. How can we be so short sighted? It seems to me that we spend too much time in history class learning about the recent past. If one of the main reasons for studying history is not to repeat the same mistakes, then we need to understand ALL of the mistakes that we have made over ALL time periods. What I mean by this is that there is ultimately a lot we can learn from the original inhabitants of North America which we have dismissed entirely since we don’t even know who they are yet exactly. Other lectures in this series discussed the concept of ‘Manifest Destiny’ and the dangers of such an ideology. Do we not think in the same way today to some extent? The MIT lecture about ‘American Exceptionalism’ seems to prove that we do. And what might help us change this dangerous thought process? I think it’s a greater understanding and respect for those that have come before us. This article, therefore, is my way of tuning into the debate and trying to understand what we know and what we don’t know about those who inhabited our continent first.

How I can use these ideas in a geography classroom
This article immediately reminded me of a wonderful source for studying the history of humankind and the diffusion of human beings across the planet – The Genographic Project by National Geographic. Without hesitating, I went straight to the project’s website to learn more and was fascinated by the detail, but also simplicity of its explanations. I’d like to discuss what I find important about this project and how I might plug my students in or use its ideas in my geography classroom.

The following is a good description of The Genographic Project taken from its website at: https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/index.html
“The Genographic Project is seeking to chart new knowledge about the migratory history of the human species by using sophisticated laboratory and computer analysis of DNA contributed by hundreds of thousands of people from around the world. In this unprecedented and of real-time research effort, the Genographic Project is closing the gaps of what science knows today about humankind's ancient migration stories.”

Through genetic research these scientists and anthropologists have created a map of the best known movements of the human beings since our beginnings in Africa approximately 200,000 years ago. According to the their findings so far, all human beings lived in Africa until 60,000 years ago when they finally made their way out of the continent. From there they populated Asia and Australia first before populating Europe and the Americas. Physical geography (the natural environment) played an important role in this diffusion as it either enabled or limited movement. Australia, for instance, was able to be populated before Europe because it was surprisingly easier to access. Land bridges across the Sunda Shelf connected mainland to insular Southeast Asia and then Australia while mountains obstructed movement into Europe. Similarly, North America could only be inhabited once the land bridge at Beringia was established due to low sea levels during an ice age. It was only later that technology and exploration mixed up the genetic pool drastically.

So why is this project important for the geography classroom? The primary reason I think this is essential knowledge is that it shows us we all come from the same ancestors – that we are equal as human beings no matter what our ‘status’ at the moment is. Having students understand the origins of the human species also allows them to see that migration has been happening since the beginning of humankind and that it is normal. Politics and the modern nation state may have skewed people’s understanding over time of the basic natural inclination of humankind to look for what is best for them and their family. In short, I think an understanding of the origins of humankind helps keep us open minded and lays the foundations for appreciating all human beings for what they are and where they have come from. It helps us understand that our environments shape us in different ways and are a large factor in the way we are and the reasons for differences between people – even if we come from the same place in the beginning. Lastly, an understanding of the time frames over which all of human history has taken place is a useful thing to compare to the time frame over which the planet has existed. What I mean by that is that human existence is just a tiny fraction of the planet’s existence. As geography students, one needs to have an understanding of scale – both spatial as well as temporal.

Ideally, I’d love to have every single student of mine be able to trace their DNA back and create a map of their origins and their ancestry. This, of course, is too expensive for a school project since the kits from National Geography cost more than $100. But what if a student or multiple students were to write to National Geographic asking if we could do it as a class? What if they proposed some sort of a project with achievable goals that is innovative and unique which would be mutually beneficial for National Geographic and my students? What if the students chipped in to trace the origins of just one student in the class or someone famous from the school like the principal? How do we get real projects like this into the school system? We’re always constrained by ‘the unit’ or ‘the exam’ when in reality this type of a project would be so much more useful and memorable for students. Alternatively, I can envision students creating a photo essay which incorporates pictures of human beings with similar DNA sequences of different skin colors, socio-economic backgrounds, or places of origin. If I would have made a bulletin board for this assignment it would have been similar to this. Again, the main goal here, and what I believe is an important goal of geography at the middle or high school level in general, is to push the idea of equality amongst all people across the globe. What better way to do that then to visually show who we are connected to and what they look like? In many cases it may be very different than ourselves.