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.The Great Mirror is a website with amazing pictures I have used for years to help students learn and analyze the cultural landscape. The cultural landscape is the combination of cultural features such as language and religion, economic features such as agriculture and industry, and physical geography such as climate and vegetation.
Modern-day East Asia lends to some fascinating cultural landscape studies for the students. Pictures can be analyzed in class, individually and/or used in an assessment activity.
Analyzing the cultural landscape gets the students to look at the details of the pictures - something they don't do often anymore. I start with just having them list what they see - no inferences, no conclusions drawn. Then when they have the list they can start drawing conclusions, then go to inferences. The clues act as supporting details to the conclusions. The inferences come from connecting prior knoweldge and asking questions. Cultural landscape study is a great higher-level thinking activity that also gets them to think about perspectives.
Below is screenshot from the AP Human Geography curriculum in which Cultural Landscape is a significant, on-going idea throughout the course. l
