Today I had my first class session as adjunct professor of Geography at Virginia International University. The class is very interesting in that they are entirely international. I have a Gambian, Nigerian, 2 Brazilians, 7 Mongolians, 1 Russian, 1 Croatian, 1 German, 4 Nepalese and 1 japanese student. One thing that makes this an interesting audience is that I cannot rely on previous lectures given to a primarily American audience at Piedmont Virginia Community College.

For example, when discussing the concept of vernacular regions, I brought up “The South.” A quick definition of a vernacular region is an area people recognize as part of their cultural identity. To Americans, the South is a familiar concept, typically referring to the area of the Southeastern United States. It references the American Civil War. These students did not have a concept of the American Civil War. This is a challenge, but not an impossible one. Since I more interested in teaching the concept rather than the South, I know when the students understand the concept when they can identify vernacular regions in their own experience. For example, most students could identify with The Middle East.

When discussing Place, Location and the Geographic Grid, students enjoyed using Google Earth as a teaching tool. Their first assignment was to find the latitude and longitude of their home. This is the first in a series of assignments requiring them to provide a descriptive account of the geography of their home.

The lecture itself was titled The Tools of Geographic Inquiry and included the following concepts:

• Place
• Location
• Region
• Functional Region
• Formal Region
• Vernacular Region
• Space
• Distribution
• Density
• Site
• Situation
• cultural landscape
• scale
• spatial association
• cultural ecology
• density
• diffusion

We also discussed Yali’s Question in Guns, Germs and Steel, relating to wealth distribution in the world post 1492, which dispels the notion that wealth belongs to the Western world because of quality of the people and replaces it with the physical geographic factors contributing to European dominance.