Using Google Maps with Alternative Learners

This lesson plan will help students visualize unfamiliar geographic settings. For whatever reason (there’s probably an anthropological explanation), humans around the world are often ignorant of locales 3,000 miles away. Most Americans don’t understand the political distinctions, say, between different sects of foreign religions, and people who have never been to America probably imagine that it’s all like Die Hard or Blade Runner. Some whose first visit to the states included a stop at Austin’s SXSW festival might have found those expectations fulfilled, but I digress.

Given such short-sidedness, this lesson plan is for college-level students who are assigned to read something like Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat, and yet who struggle to understand the historical politics of a place like the mid-nineteenth century Caucus. The strength of the exercise is that it helps students visualize where all sorts of unfamiliar places are on a map. A potential weakness of this exercise is that you’ll encourage underperforming students to rely on the Internet for information. It’s precisely these students, especially if they’re Literature or Rhetoric majors, who instead need encouragement to read more. In any case, humble me is merely proffering up this lesson plan to a caring forum, and we can all keep debating issues like this for the rest of our careers.