Travel Writing and Understanding Essential Elements of Geography

 Lillian J. Fleming
Illinois Geographic Alliance Summer Geography Institute, 1998

Preview of Main Ideas & Connection with the Curriculum

Travel writing has always been a popular form of presenting geographic experience. Examples of travel writing include published classics and best-sellers as well as private and personal journal and diary writing. The travel experience is a universal human experience, since travel is simply moving any distance across earth’s surface. How and where we travel, what we observe and how we reflect upon and preserve the experience represents geographic learning at its best.

Students will recall, discuss, and write about various journeys they have made. Travels may be local or global.

Teaching Level: Community College Adult Learners

Adaptable for higher and lower levels

Objective #1: Students will recall and describe places they have visited by including significant physical and human features.

Essential Element: Places and Regions.

Standard #4: The physical and human characteristics of places will be highlighted.

Objective #2: Students will understand the purpose of mental maps.

Essential Element: Seeing the world in spatial terms.

Standard #2: Using mental maps to organize information about people, places, and environments in a spatial context.

Objective #3: Students will locate places they are describing on a blank world map and record latitude and longitude.

Essential Element: Seeing the world in spatial terms.

Standard #1: How to use maps and other geographic representations, tools, and technologies to acquire, process, and report information from a spatial perspective.

Objective #4: Students will organize travel destinations into regions.

Essential Element: Places and Regions.

Standard #5: Regions are created by people to interpret Earth’s complexity.

Objective #5: Students will participate in learning experiences that require working with others and communicating both orally and in writing in areas related to geography.

Essential Element: Uses of Geography.

Standard #17: Applying geography to interpret the past and present.

1. Paper, pencils, or pens.
2. Blank world maps showing latitude and longitude.
3. Travel photos by students, post cards, souvenirs, and other memorabilia, if available.
4. Wall map and adhesive flags or push pins, broad-tipped colored markers.

1. Prior to doing this class activity, discuss personal travel experiences. Point out that you will convey the personality of the place by citing various physical and human characteristics of a place that you recall. Explain the place theme. Discuss mental maps. Discuss latitude and longitude of locations.
2. As an outside assignment have students write brief essays describing trips they have made and places they have visited. In class, ask several students to describe trips they’ve made. Encourage students to bring photos, postcards, or other souvenirs, if available.

1. Have students exchange and read a paper by another student. Have students write further questions they wish to ask about the places described. Allow students 15-30 minutes to interview each other to get more information using the questions they wrote.
2. Have students describe to the rest of the class the place visited by their partners and mark its location on the wall map, indicating latitude and longitude. Do this for the whole class.

1. When the wall map is completed, organize the various destinations into regions and look for similar characteristics that may be used to define the region.
2. Create regions in different ways using various characteristics.

1. From a list of visited places, have students recall several physical and cultural features that match.
2. Have students write a brief essay defining and describing world regions and why we organize the world this way.

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