Human Geography (GEOG 105)
Human Geography (GEOG 105)
Purpose: to help other instructors teaching the same course
Common Course ID: GEOG 105
CSU Instructor Open Textbook Adoption Portrait
Abstract: This open textbook was designed for a geography course for undergraduate students by Katie Koscielak at Cal Poly Humboldt. The open textbook provides an overview of introductory concepts within the fields of human and cultural geography, such as population/migration/demography, cultural landscapes, identity (race & ethnicity), political geographies, power & territory, place & placemaking, globalization, urbanization, the rise of commodity markets, food & agriculture, and climate change, among other subthemes. The main motivation to adopt an open textbook was that the department had created an informal agreement among themselves to make all readings and textbooks free or available at no cost to students (when possible) so as to minimize cost barriers. Students access the open textbook in digital format as a variety of links provided in the Canvas page for the course.
Course Title and Number-Human Geography GEOG 105
Brief Description of course highlights: This course seeks to impart a geographical lens for looking at the world, with the aim of introducing students to the discipline of human, cultural geography. This is the first building block in understanding notions of place, and the many systems that contribute to this concept, including intersections between environment, politics, economy, culture, and others. In the course, we examine a multitude of global case studies and issues to help make the concepts of human geography real, alive, and applied. Reflection upon each student’s individual life story and their experiences of place help them navigate, analyze, and digest a multitude of world issues, dynamics, and events. Ultimately this course attempts to get students to think about how the world is shaped by a confluence of space, people, and the environment at different scales and levels. As a sustainability focused course and one that seeks to impart values of diversity and common ground, the course also prompts students to reflect on what sorts of world issues incite a passion for affecting systemic change, building personal and institutional resilience, and for the ways in which students can co-create a prosperous and life-sustaining society.
Student population: This is a lower division course with no prerequisites or special consent required for enrollment. It also fulfils general education requirements, under Area D: Social Sciences, meets requirements for receiving “Diversity & Common Ground” designation, and meets the criteria to be designated a “sustainability focused” course. In fall, it is composed of majority freshman students, and in spring, is composed of a broader mix of upper and lower division students across all majors. It is a required course for all Geography majors. During AY 23-24 when this OER outline was designed, it was also one of the fall “block scheduled courses” for all students in the “Global Humboldt” place-based learning community.
Learning or student outcomes: Upon successful completion, students in this course will be able to:
- Articulate critical intersections between environmental, cultural, political, and economic systems in a variety of global case studies.
- Co-locate their own stories of place and identity within a larger framework of global human geography.
- Demonstrate cornerstones of geographical human context, theory, concepts, and discourse.
- Identify and utilize geographical scholarship, databases, and media to find and present information.
Key challenges faced and how resolved: It took a significant amount of time and effort to locate and vet open access resources that would cover the breadth of topics that the course required. I would have preferred to find one, (or perhaps just a handful) of open access textbooks that would sufficiently cover the “Intro to Human Geography” portfolio, but I was unable to find one that sufficiently and skillfully tied together the themes and modules I wanted to cover in the course. This meant I had to find a lot of disparate chapters, webpages, and articles on sub-themes to assemble readings for the full course.
Syllabus and/or Sample assignment from the course or the adoption: To illustrate how the open textbook was used in the course, I would select a topic for each week, assign a supplemental reading or two, and then require students to complete a related assignment. Syllabus and Sample assignments for Human Geography 105.docx
OER/Low Cost Adoption Process
Provide an explanation or what motivated you to use this textbook or OER/Low Cost option. The main motivation to use these resources is to save students money. The supplemental resources are used to help students understand the issues in a more visual, applied way and in many cases, from the direct voices and perspectives of communities involved in the issues.
How did you find and select the open textbook for this course? Browsed OER sites, read and personally evaluated resources.
Sharing Best Practices: It takes time to review materials and make final selections. It also takes implementing a new resource a time or two before you know the degree to which it is working well or not for students and imparting what you want them to learn. Go in with the expectation that the process will be iterative and fluid over time, where you refine your resource list more and more each semester.
Describe any key challenges you experienced, how they were resolved and lessons learned. In theory, I’d love to find one OER textbook that is complete, substantive, simple, and at a high enough quality to simply replace the comparable hard-copy textbook. However, I have not been successful in accomplishing this so at this time, I’m piecing together a list of several different readings to support the academic and disciplinary connections I want students in the class to make.
Instructor Name - Katie Koscielak
I am a Geography and Environmental Studies lecturer at Cal Poly Humboldt. 
Please provide a link to your university page.
https://enst.humboldt.edu/people/katie-koscielak
Please describe the courses you teach I teach ENST 490S Capstone Experience, and have taught GEOG 105 Human Geography. The courses I teach are often directly related to human / environment interactions, with a specific focus on applied, real world scenarios and case studies. I utilize notions of place and place making heavily when teaching Geography.
Describe your teaching philosophy and any research interests related to your discipline or teaching. As a teacher, I aim to integrate an interdisciplinary lens to my lessons, whereby students make connections that multiple systems and dimensions are interrelated and interdependent. I respect the fact that there are many different ways of thinking and knowing that bring vital richness to our community. I try to overlay specific disciplinary themes and concepts over more generalized practice with developing strong study skills, uplifting student empowerment and confidence, and utilizing robust and defensible research techniques. I try lead by example, modeling best practices of scholarly inquiry and respectful dialog in the classroom. For freshman students specifically, I often complete the same exercises as my students, using my work as a model and to demonstrate my expectations. I am firmly committed to the values of anti-racism, liberation, equity, and justice and am committed to dismantling supremacist behavior in the classroom. I engage in a process of crafting participatory community guidelines early in each course and create shared expectations and systems for repair when tensions arise. I try to be fairly flexible around things like attendance and late work, as I know the students I teach are facing a wide array of challenges in their daily and personal lives. I recall the challenges I faced as a college student and therefore bring this empathy and compassion as a foundational pillar to the way I approach teaching.
Textbook or OER/Low-cost Title: A single title was not used. Links to each selected open-source reading were included in the course Canvas for students to access free of charge. In some cases, they did have to login to the campus library platform to avoid paywalls.
Brief Description: I searched for relevant readings, articles, websites, and open, online textbooks that students from Cal Poly Humboldt could access for free without having to go through a paywall.
Please provide a link to the resource
Susanna Gough, “GeoExplainer: What is human geography”, geographical.co.uk, July 19, 2023, accessed Jan 16, 2024, https://geographical.co.uk/science-environment/geo-explainer-what-is-human-geography
Christine Rosenfeld & Nathan Burtch. Human Geography. Chapter 3 Population, Migration, & Spatial Demography. Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License: 2023. https://viva.pressbooks.pub/humangeog/chapter/population-migration-spatial-demography/
“Cultural Landscapes: Definition & Examples,” Hellovaia.com, accessed Jan 16, 2024. https://www.hellovaia.com/explanations/human-geography/cultural-geography/cultural-landscapes/
“Inuit Nunangat,” Canadian Geographic Indigenous Peoples’ Atlas of Canada, accessed Jan 16, 2024. https://indigenouspeoplesatlasofcanada.ca/article/inuit-nunangat
“Inuit,” Pulling Together: Foundations Guide by Kory Wilson and Colleen Hodgson (MNBC), Kory Wilson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 International License, https://opentextbc.ca/indigenizationfoundations/chapter/topic-inuit
Dorrell, David, “CHAPTER 7: ETHNICITY AND RACE” in Introduction to Human Geography (2nd Edition), eds Galileo Open Learning Materials (Human Geography Commons, 2019). 127- 146.
Geological Sciences and Geography Open Textbooks. 2. https://oer.galileo.usg.edu/geo-textbooks/2
Dartmouth Library Research Guides. “Human Geography, Political Geography.” Accessed Jan 16, 2024. https://researchguides.dartmouth.edu/human_geography/political, featuring Castree, N., Kitchin, R., & Rogers, A. (2013). "Political geography." In A Dictionary of Human Geography. Oxford University Press. Originally Retrieved 21 Jan 2022
“Political Geography,” Intro to Human Geography. Salt Lake Community College. Slcc.pressbooks.pub, Accessed Jan 16, 2024. https://slcc.pressbooks.pub/humangeography/part/political-geography
“China: Timeline.” History.com, 2019. Accessed Jan 16, 2024. https://www.history.com/topics/asian-history/china-timeline
“What Is Placemaking?” Project for Public Spaces, 2007, https://www.pps.org/article/what-is-placemaking
A Space for Place in Sociology by Thomas Gieryn (2000) (first 5 pages, through 467)
Slide Deck from Alexander Thomas. A Primer in Urbanization: An Overview of the Science of the City. Center for Small Cities & Urban Studies. Utica.edu. Accessed Jan 16, 2024. https://www.utica.edu/academic/institutes/ucsc/doc/A%20Primer%20in%20Urbanization%20UC.pdf
Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser. Our World In Data: Urbanization. Ourworldindata.org. Original publication 2018; edited 2019. Accessed Jan 16, 2024. https://ourworldindata.org/urbanization
“Encyclopedic Entry: Development.” National Geographic Society Education. Accessed 21 May 2024. https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/development
“Understanding Commodity Markets.” OER Commons. Accessed 21 May 2024. https://oercommons.org/courseware/lesson/67067/student/?section=7
Schewe, Erik. “Global Food Security: A Primer,” JSTOR Daily, (2018): https://daily.jstor.org/global-food-security-a-primer
“Industrialization of Agriculture,” Food System Primer, Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. Accessed 21 May 2024: https://foodsystemprimer.org/production/industrialization-of-agriculture
“A Map of Where Your Food Originated May Surprise You,” NPR Food For Thought, (2016): https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/06/13/481586649/a-map-of-where-your-food-originated-may-surprise-you
Xia, Rosanna. 2019. California Against the Sea. Los Angeles Times. July 7, 2019. https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-sea-level-rise-california-coast
Gelles, David and Mike Baker. “Judge Rules in Favor of Montana Youths in a Landmark Climate Case,” New York Times, (2023): https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/14/us/montana-youth-climate-ruling.html
Student access: Students accessed the materials through links embedded in the Canvas for the course.
Supplemental resources:
Films
- What's the difference between a migrant and refugee? 4:11 min
- Migrantes (15:28 min)
- What is Migration (4:58 min)
- Angry Inuk (1 hour 22 min total)
- Race & Ethnicity (6:53 min)
- Race, Ethnicity & Cultural Landscape (12:04 min)
- The Origin of Race in USA (9:22 min)
- The Invention of Whiteness (4:57 min)
- Mirrors of the Heart: Americas. Corporation for Public Broadcasting. 1993.
Panopto Link (Total time 54 min)
- Tank Man (1 hr 25 min total)
- Guarding Ancestral Ground with the Wiyot from Tending Nature, Season 3,
Episode 1 | KCET (26:40 min)
- Reflexión #SoyXochimilco (17:18 min)
- How Mexican Muralism Sparked a Public Art Movement (7:04 min)
- Las Muralistas: Our Walls, Our Stories (28:31 min)
- Maquilapolis (1 hr 8 min)
- Black Gold: Wake Up & Smell the Coffee (Total time 1 hr 17 min)
- Urban Roots film (1 hr 32 min total)
- What Was the Agricultural Revolution (10:01 min)
- Why is there uneven access to food? (Crash Course Geography) (11:31 min)
- How do we Produce Food (Crash Course Geography (11:39 min)
- The Drawdown Roadmap: The Science Behind the Roadmap Unit 2 (21:30 min)
- How to Let Go of the World & Love all the Things Climate Can’t Change
(total time 2 hours)
Activity
- A Tale of 3 Megacities: São Paulo (Brazil), Tokyo (Japan), and Lagos (Nigeria).
- Coffee activity (Oxfam, The Coffee Chain Game)
- https://ig.ft.com/climate-game/
- Map quizzes: https://www.geoguessr.com/quiz/seterra
Provide the cost savings from that of a traditional textbook. The comparable textbook for this course (Human Geography: People, Place, and Culture 12th Edition by Erin H. Fouberg and Alexander B. Murphy) is currently listed on Amazon (at 50% off) for a price of $69. This means that the OER approach I’ve built into this course is potentially saving students around $140 at full price.
License: The materials used in this course are a combination of both copyrighted and formally openly licensed.