Published on GEOG 430: Human Use of Environment (https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog430)

Home > Course Outline > Week 1 - Getting Started

Week 1 - Getting Started

For the first week of the class I expect you to carefully read through the syllabus and the orientation material for the course. You can access the Syllabus [1] and the Orientation [2]; by clicking on the links in the blue menu bar.

The links below provide an outline of the material for this lesson. Be sure to carefully read through the entire lesson before returning to Canvas to submit your assignments.

Week 1 Introduction

Materials for Week 1:

  • Carefully read the Course SYLLABUS on the course website and on Canvas.
  • Carefully read the ORIENTATION section on the course website.
  • Carefully read the Week 1 sections on the course website.
  • Read Chapter 1 of Moseley, W. G., Perramond, E., Hapke, H. M., & Laris, P. (2014). An introduction to human-environment geography: local dynamics and global processes. John Wiley & Sons.

In the SYLLABUS, ORIENTATION, and on the following pages you will find important information about the course structure, requirements, scheduling, and technical requirements and assistance — all of which you'll need to know in order to pass the course.

You are also responsible for knowing this information and not knowing it could easily CAUSE YOU TO LOSE VALUABLE MARKS.

Assignments Due in Week 1:

  • Take the Week 1 Quiz (by Friday at 11:59 pm Eastern Time).
  • Post your Introduction in the Getting to Know You Forum.

Please see the calendar in Canvas for specific due dates.

Week 1 Objectives:

At the end of this week:

  • Students will understand the course policies, course structure, different types of assignments, and their contribution to final grades.
  • Students will introduce themselves to the class and read the Bios of the teaching team.

Questions?

If, AFTER YOU HAVE READ THE WEEK 1 MATERIAL AND SYLLABUS, you have any questions, please post them to our General Course Questions discussion forum (not e-mail), located under the Modules tab in Canvas. The TA and I will check that discussion forum regularly to respond. While you are there, feel free to post your own responses if you, too, are able to help out a classmate.

Meet your teaching team

Instructor:

Sara Cavallo

picture of Sara Cavallo holding a tea leaf in front of a tea plantation     a bunch of bananas on a banana plant

I am a PhD Candidate, ABD starting my fifth year here at Penn State.  ABD stands for "All But Dissertation" which means I've completed all required coursework and exams, and now I am working on writing my dissertation. 

My research interests are centered in Environment and Society geography, specifically looking at food and agricultural systems, through the lens of political ecology.  By the end of the course, you will know what that means! If you are interested in learning more about food and agricultural studies, political ecology, or geography in general, feel free to reach out.

My dissertation research itself centers on a bacterial plant disease affecting bananas of all varieties in East Africa and the knowledge networks farmers have crafted and relied on in order to manage the disease effectively.  Bananas are a staple crop in East Africa, particularly in Uganda where I work.  Therefore, this disease and its impacts on banana production not only affect farmers, but the broader food system as well.  This project relies primarily on content analysis of qualitative research data gathered from interviews, print materials, and participant observation.

My master's research was based in Uganda as well but focused on a different sector of the food system, tea.  This project combined land cover/land use change analysis, GIS, and archival research to understand how the tea industry within Uganda has influenced landscape change, particularly to surrounding forest areas.

Teaching Assistant:

Gabriel Tamariz

Gabriel is from Mexico City, has a BA in International Relations (Mexico) and a MSc in Political Ecology (Barcelona), and is now doing a PhD in Geography at Penn State. He is most interested in the interactions between agrobiodiversity, food sovereignty, and power, particularly in conflict landscapes.

Course Structure of GEOG 430

This course will be conducted entirely on the World Wide Web. There are no set class meeting times, but you will be required to complete weekly assignments. Registered students in this course will need to navigate between several environments in the World Wide Web. These include:

  • This site - The instructional materials in this site include 12 weeks of course material, including this course introduction and Orientation (Week 1), the syllabus, and several other helpful supplemental pages.
  • Canvas [3] - Penn State's NEW course management system. In this course, we'll use Canvas for our course calendar, to communicate, to access some of the readings and films, to submit assignments, and to post grades.

Registered?

Penn State logo

Not registered? Students who register for this Penn State course gain access to assignments and instructor feedback, and earn academic credit.

Topics of study

GEOG 430 examines the human use of resources and ecosystems, the multiple causes and consequences of environmental degradation, and the questions of justice at stake in how we understand and manage the environment. The major objective of this course is to help geographers, earth scientists, and other professionals develop an awareness and appreciation of the multiple perspectives that can be brought back to studies of human use of the environment and of the social and environmental consequences of the resource-management decisions that are made in different parts of the world. This is a capstone course that encourages students to place their individual major and technical skills within the context of multiple approaches to environmental decision making and management in complex and dynamic social-ecological systems.

A table outlining the weekly lesson topics can be found on the syllabus page.

Typical Schedule of Weekly Activities

For this course, weeks run on a Friday-Thursday schedule.

Our weekly schedule for this semester will be Friday-Thursday. You will have access to the Week's materials beginning on Friday at 12:01 am Eastern so that you can work on them on Friday and over the weekend in preparation for the week's activities. You need to complete all the requirements for that week by the following Thursday. Each week, you will have course content, assigned readings, a short automated quiz, and writing assignments. Every few weeks, you will additionally have a current event essay writing assignment to reinforce your learning. In this assignment, we will ask you to examine a current event in relation to course material and specific readings. Every few weeks, you will turn in certain components of your final essay and thus you can expect to receive feedback for your pieces of the final essay throughout the semester. We hope that doing this will help you know our expectations better and do better on your final essay. Note that in the Canvas Modules tab, each week will have its own content including a checklist specifying all the associated work and deliverables of the week.

I have designed the course so the assignments requiring student feedback are due Tuesdays at 11:59 pm Eastern Time, and all student feedback is due by Thursdays at 11:59 pm Eastern Time (except for the very first week of the course). Assignments that do not require feedback are due on Thursdays at 11:59 pm Eastern Time. For specific due dates, you can always refer to the calendar in Canvas.

Course assignments

Note: General information about each assignment type can be found in the Assignment Outlines and Instructions [4] section of the syllabus. Specific information about each type of assignment can be found in within the lessons.

  • Weekly Quizzes [5]: Each multiple-choice quiz will assess how well you engaged the week's reading materials.
  • Weekly Questions and Reactions [6]: You will share your critical thinking about the week's materials and provide thoughtful questions in Canvas discussion forums. The activity provides an opportunity to get to know your classmates and talk about the materials.
  • Current Event Essays [7]: Using course materials, you will analyze and respond to a current event selected by the instructor.
  • Final Essay [8]: A 3,000 to 3,500-word paper that engages with a topic related to human-environmental geographic relationships.

How to Succeed in GEOG 430

Academic Integrity

There has been a troubling increase in the number of cases of academic integrity violation, which spans from honest mistakes to worse cases where students know the behavior is "copying" but still do it anyway. Yes. There are real people who get the dreaded "XF" on the Penn State transcript. Penn State faculty and staff have become very alert and vigilant, including our own team of instructors.

Throughout the course, you will be regularly writing and submitting your written assignments, mainly your Weekly Questions and Reactions, Current Event Discussion, and Final Essays. Every element of the submissions should be either (1) your original work, or (2) properly cited idea of somebody else's. If you want to mention somebody else's idea in your work, you should follow an established set of rules for doing so. In this class, we use the APA citation style for all citations done in all assignments. More information can be found in the 'Quick Guide to Citations' in the 'Resources' menu. Be aware that the material you submit for this course will be compared with online material using tools including Turnitin.

In terms of quizzes, you need to come without any information about the specific quiz questions themselves and correct/incorrect answers to them. Yes, they are open-book exams, but the only things you can refer to is raw course materials and your own notes about them. Sharing answers with classmates, or seeking answers on websites such as Course Hero is an intentional violation of academic integrity and will be carefully watched for using a variety of methods.

Penn State does not exempt you from consequences even when the violation was done without sufficient knowledge ("honest mistakes"). So, please make yourself aware of what constitutes a breach of academic integrity.

Please have a look at Penn State resources (Undergrad Advising Handbook [9] and a web page from College of Earth and Mineral Sciences [10]) to see what academic integrity is and what consequences it might bring when breached.

Information to avoid common mistakes

  1. Please use both (1) in-text citation and (2) end-of-the-document citation (a.k.a. reference list, works cited list) per one work cited. I have seen frequent cases of losing points by only giving a list of works cited at the end of the assignment text and missing in-text citation.
  2. When you are borrowing somebody else's idea in a word-for-word manner("direct quotes"), use quotation marks in the in-text citation. Failing to do so constitutes a breach of academic integrity. Yes! This rule applies even when you are citing definitions from dictionaries!

Example:

As the heroine of Little Women notes, Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents. (Wrong)
As the heroine of Little Women notes, "Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents"(Alcott, 1868, pg. #). (Correct)

Citation (end-of-the-document) information that frequently gets left out

In this course, we seek to provide a learning experience to practice properly citing other people's works. One of the ways to do so is reflected in the fact that the citation information you can get from this website deliberately omits some of the essential citation information. You are the one who needs to look up the information to provide complete citation information in your submissions of Weekly Questions and Reactions, Current Event Discussions, and the Final Essay.

Typically, the citation on this website is lacking the following information about the cited material you need to fill in in your assignments:

For Articles:

  1. Full journal name - it is NOT the same as the name of the web database service. No Science Directs or Wileys, please.
  2. Journal volume and issue number

For Books and Book Chapters

  1. Full publisher information (e.g., city of publication)
  2. A book chapter citation should include both (1) the title of the whole book, and (2) the title of the specific chapter you are borrowing ideas from.

Web-based, non-print resources

Add a web address when it is an exclusively web-based resource (e.g., YouTube video clip).

An example of a citation of a journal article:

In the below image, the first (wrong) one is a Google Scholar result, copy and pasted without any revision.
The second (correct) one is still a Google Scholar result, but I added missing information by doing an additional search.

This shows that 1) You MAY use Google Scholar or another citation generator, BUT 2) more often than not, you need to ADD to or EDIT your citation generator result to get them right.
Google Scholar image showing a manufactured incorrect citation and the edits needed to correct it

Week 1 Reading

Reading Assignment

Moseley, W. G., Perramond, E., Hapke, H. M., & Laris, P. (2014). An introduction to human-environment geography: local dynamics and global processes. John Wiley & Sons.

We’ll begin this semester with the first chapter from one of the leading Human-Environment Geography textbooks. This chapter is meant to make sure we are all on the same page. It offers a great introduction to some of the major themes we will encounter during this semester. Reading this will help you understand what Human-Environment Geography is and how it might relate to some of the more specific issues we talk about in this course. It will also be helpful for you as you get ready to write your first Current Event Essay which will be due in Week 3 and focuses on the California drought. 

Registered students can access a copy of this reading in the Week 1 Module in Canvas.

 

Week 1 Tasks and Checklist

At the end of Week 1, make sure you have done the following:

  • Read the Course SYLLABUS on the course website and on Canvas.
  • Read the ORIENTATION section on the course website.
  • Read the Week 1 sections on the course website.
  • Read Chapter 1 of Moseley, W. G., Perramond, E., Hapke, H. M., & Laris, P. (2014). An introduction to human-environment geography: local dynamics and global processes. John Wiley & Sons.
  • Taken the Week 1 Quiz (by Friday at 11:59 pm Eastern Time).
  • Posted your Introduction in the Getting to Know You Forum.

Feel free to start reading the chapters for Week 2 in order to get a head start for next week....


Source URL: https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog430/node/363

Links
[1] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog430/syllabus
[2] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog430/orientation
[3] https://psu.instructure.com/
[4] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog430/syllabus#Assignmentoutlinesinstructions
[5] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog430/syllabus#quiz
[6] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog430/syllabus#q&r
[7] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog430/syllabus#reflect
[8] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog430/syllabus#essay
[9] http://handbook.psu.edu/content/academic-integrity
[10] http://www.ems.psu.edu/current_undergrad_students/academics/integrity_policy