Landscapes Mini Lesson

MINI LESSON on LANDSCAPES

While landscape details are usually not the primary focus of a story in an English classroom (the plot and characters are), it is always important to look at them in order to gain a deep understanding the story. In this webquest, the concept of landscapes allows us to look through three different frames to the details on which we can build our social studies learning about Canada's First Nations peoples.

Other words you could use for looking at a story's landscape are background, setting or context. The meaning of the story is framed by:

the particular history (time) and location (place) of a particular culture (people)

the writer's perspective, as well as

the reader's awareness and ability to understand.

"Behind" the plot and the characters of the story are the:

PHYSICAL OR NATURAL LANDSCAPE

CULTURAL LANDSCAPE

PERSONAL LANDSCAPES

Consider how knowing details of the landscapes adds to the richness of the meaning of the story:

CRITICAL REFLECTION

THE SETTING OR GEOGRAPHY, INCLUDING THE TOPOGRAPHY, CLIMATE, RESOURCES, VEGETATION, AND WILDLIFE, MAKE UP THE ...

PHYSICAL OR NATURAL LANDSCAPE

Horizons: Canada Moves West (Cranny et al, 1999) is the grade 10 text you will use next year. It states:

... you experience geography every day. Geography is about location .... [It] brings together many fields of study: it draws on a wide range of subjects, such as climate, geology, hydrology, economics, and biology. It looks for spatial patterns on Earth in order to understand how humans live (93).

AND

Geographers study place, using five organizing principles to help them gather, organize, and analyse their information:

places have a location; that is, they can be defined by longitude and latitude, or they can be defined in relation to other known information or places

places have physical and cultural characteristics; that is, they have landforms, proximity to water, particular resources and climate, for example. Different groups of people have different ways of interacting with the physical world

places change; that is, nothing in nature stays the same; how a place looks today is the result of changes and movement over time; geographers are interested in how places change over time

places interact with other places [interactions]: that is, people, ideas, things, and goods move across the landscape; places we live in have an impact on other places; people travel, communicate, and use products, information, and ideas from around the world.

places are in regions: that is, geographers organize people into areas with like characteristics; these might be defined by common characteristics of climate, economy, culture, and so on.

Let's use the frame of location or place. The story takes place in Northern Manitoba; the people and their ways of life are known to anthropologists as members of a First Nations group called Woodlands Cree. These people anticipated the annual migration of the caribou herds across the vast Canadian Shield region. When you apply the frame of place to the story, you look for and identify details of the physical landscape.

Some sample questions to use in looking for details about the physical landscape are:

What do you already know about the region?
What do the pictures show about the natural world?
What details of the environment or natural world (eg: vegetation, animals, climate, or topography) do you hear about in the story?
What are people doing in the natural world?

THE PEOPLE IN THE STORY AND THE AUTHOR COME FROM A PARTICULAR

CULTURAL LANDSCAPE

In Horizons: Canada Moves West, the authors state:

Environments that have been used and altered by human are called "cultural environments" or "cultural landscapes." Culture -- and cultural attitudes -- determine how people view and use the land. For example, the Cree of the Interior Plains did not view the land and its resources in the same way as did the fur traders, and the fur traders did not view the land with the eyes of European settlers. Opposing attitudes can often result in a crisis, for example, the extinction of the North American bison, or the conflict that has arisen between environmentalists and the logging industry in BC (115).

AND

The Native peoples [have] used the environment for millennia without significantly changing the landscape. Wherever they lived -- on the Canadian Shield, the Interior Plains, or the Western Mountains -- they used land and water resources in a way that respected the natural environment (115).

AND

The visible results of human activity are known as the "cultural landscape." People of different cultures usually affect the landscape in distinct ways.

Let's use the frames of culture. Include dimensions of time and/or history when you use these frames. The story takes place in the 20th century, but it draws on the ways of life and traditions of a culture that pre-dates the arrival of the Europeans. The natural landscape and the relationship of the people to the natural world remained largely unchanged over time. The present is connected to the past in the cultural landscapes of the Northern Cree. In order to identify details of the cultural landscape, ask:

What do you already know about the culture?
How do the Cree people in the story understand and express their relationship to the natural world? To each other?
How do the cultural and spiritual understandings in the story relate to the traditional ways of the group depicted in the story?
Have the traditions changed over time?
What factors might account for change in the cultural landscape? Are these revealed in the story?

IN STUDYING LITERATURE, WE CONSIDER THAT BOTH THE READER AND THE WRITER BRING THEIR OWN ...

PERSONAL LANDSCAPES

... TO THEIR READING OF THE STORY

Readers and writers, like artists, both have personal landscapes upon which they draw to interpret or make sense of the world. These personal landscapes are like lenses or frames which exist in our heads. They are different for each reader and writer; we use them all the time. They are always being shaped and re-shaped by particular life experiences. Family, education, work, life experiences, other people, travels, religion, and culture are some of the factors which shape how we value things in life, how we look at the world, how we understand and express the meaning we make of each new experience that we have. These personal landscapes are also linked to our attitudes and values.

Stories inform as well as engage readers. You have a different relationship to the story when you are more informed about the subject matter. In the case of the First Nations stories that you will read or hear about, you can expand your knowledge of and thinking about some of the issues for First Nations peoples, as well as gain an important understanding about the ways that:

writers draw on their personal landscapes to create stories, and
readers (in this case, you and your group members or classmates) respond to and make sense of literature, developing the ability to enjoy, read, listen, interpret, and learn, by drawing on their own personal landscapes at the same time as they are building these personal landscapes through the experience of reading.

Let's examine the attitudes or values of both the reader and the writer: Tomson Highway, the author, shares his way of seeing the close relationship between his people and the natural world. Clearly this relationship is something he values. Does your culture understand the relationship between people and nature in the same way? Are you able to relate to the personal landscape of the author? How do the author's values or attitudes shape the story he tells or the story you hear? How do your own attitudes and values influence how you interpret and understand the story? How has the story shaped or re-shaped your understanding of the subject of the story?

When you read a story, you can consider the writer's personal landscape:

What experiences has the writer had that are reflected in the story?

What is the writer's cultural background, and how does this influence the story?

What understanding does the writer want the reader to gain in reading the story?

When you read a story, consider what background knowledge you need to read and interpret the story. What is your own personal landscape for reading? Some aspects of this are:

Your prior knowledge: What did you already know about the subject before you read the story?

Your ability to interact with the text: What experiences have you had that help you to better understand the story? How are the experiences in the story different from your own experiences? What did you learn from the story that you hadn't known or considered before?

Your ability to reflect on what you are reading (or to think metacognitively): What more do you think you would need to know in order to fully appreciate the story and its meaning? How might you go about learning more in order to better understand the story?

Your understanding of the purpose of literature: Who is the audience for the story? Was the story written solely to engage his readers, or was the author's intention also to inform readers?

CRITICAL REFLECTION:

Using the three different landscape frames allows you to get a deeper understanding of a story. As you listen for details in the story and look carefully at the illustrations behind the text, consider how knowing details of the landscapes adds to the richness of the meaning of the story. Can you think of a story or book or poem that you have read that made more sense ...

when you knew something more about the background, or
when you were familiar with the cultural or physical landscapes of the story, for instance, or
when you took time to consider your own or the writer's "personal landscapes"?