Information about Class
AP Human Geography Syllabus 2023-2024 Download AP Human Geography Syllabus 2023-2024
Deidre Brady Bradyd@pearland.org
Warren Robb Robbw@pearlandisd.org
1st 9weeks calendar Download 1st 9weeks calendar
Students will need 3 Subject Spiral with pockets
Advanced Placement (AP) Human Geography:
The purpose of AP Human Geography is to introduce students to the systematic study of patterns and processes that have shaped human understanding, use, and alteration of Earth’s surface. Students employ spatial concepts and landscape analysis to examine human social organization and environmental consequences. They also learn about the methods and tools geographers use in their research and applications.
Goals from the Course Description:
- Create and interpret maps, analyze geospatial data, and geographic models, including scale at all levels. GIS, aerial photographs, and satellite images, though not required, can be used effectively in the course.
- Examine human organization of space.
- Understand and explain the implications of associations and networks among phenomena in places.
- Analyze and understand how to use quantitative and qualitative sources.
- Use various theories, models, and abstract concepts to organize and understand places.
- Recognize and interpret the relationships among patterns and processes at different scales of analysis.
- Define regions and evaluate the regionalization process.
- Characterize and analyze changing interconnections among places.
Content Covered:
Unit 1: Thinking Geographically
Unit 2: Population Migration
Unit 3: Cultural Patterns and Processes
Unit 4: Political Patterns and Processes
Unit 5: Agriculture and Rural Land-Use Patterns and Processes
Unit 6: Cities and Urban Land-Use Patterns and Processes
Unit 7: Industrial and Economic Development Patterns and Processes
Source: http://apcentral.collegeboard.com Links to an external site.
Expectations
AP Human Geography is a college level course. Students taking this class receive an elevated grade point when computing their Grade Point Average (GPA). Additionally, at the end of the Spring Semester it is expected that students will take the AP Human Geography Exam. With this exam there is a possibility of earning college credit. Because of these factors, expectations and course work reflect the rigor of a college class. This poses a unique challenge; you are all high school freshmen taking a course in which college freshmen and sophomores enroll. In addition to after school tutorials, students will be exposed to study habits and skills to help make the transition from high school to college level work. However, the greatest benefit you receive is a better understanding and appreciation of the world in which we live and how connected we are to all the people who inhabit it.
Required Textbook:
Rubenstein, James M. The Cultural Landscape: An Introduction to Human Geography. 12th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2017.
Other Resources:
Unit CED Vocabulary
AP Classroom
Textbook website: www.prenhall.com/rubenstein
The district provides a collection of maps, atlases, and other print, digital and internet resource materials (which could include data sources, case studies, newspapers, and magazines) for use by students.
Digital/Media Resources include but are not limited to the following:
Relevant TedTalk Videos (www.ted.com/talks)
How the Earth Changed History, BBC, 2010.
Mr. Sinn AP Human Geography
Fiveable AP Human Geography
Grading Scale:
A 90 - 100
B 80 - 89
C 70 - 79
F 0 – 69
Class Grading Percentages:
60% Major Grades = Tests/Essays/Major Projects
40% Daily Grades = Class work/Quizzes/Homework/Writing/Reading
Assignments:
- Direct instruction with class discussion
- Student directed discussions (Socratic Seminars)
- Textbook based assignments (generally homework)
- Academic and professional vocabulary
- Individual and group activities
- Digital research projects
- Student use of technology
- Visual analysis using pictures and videos
- Mapping/Location exercises
- Case Studies using articles and videos
- Timed and take home essays known as Free Response Questions (FRQs) as on the AP Exam
- Reading Check Point Quizzes
- Unit Tests using and mirroring AP released questions
Homework:
This is a college level course and therefore requires different work than traditional high school classes. Students should expect approximately 30 minutes to 1 hour of work a day or some variation of 4-5 hours a week. Some academic weeks may carry a considerably lighter or heavier load depending on the activities planned.
Make Up Work:
Students are expected to turn in all assignments on time. If a student is absent the day an assignment is explained or due, they are given the amount of days missed to finish the work. If an absence is over one week, the student will need to discuss arrangements with teacher. A grade of a 0 is given to all work missed. If a student fails to complete the missing work, the grade of 0 stays. Once the work is completed it will be graded for full credit.
Late Work:
Late work is not accepted in AP courses, students that do not turn in work on time will receive a zero.
Curriculum Outline
Unit I: Geography: Its Nature and Perspectives
- Geography as a field of inquiry
- Major geographical concepts underlying the geographical perspective: location, space, place, scale,
pattern, nature and society, regionalization, globalization, and gender issues
- Key geographical skills
○ How to use and think about maps and geospatial date
○ How to understand and interpret the implications of associations among phenomena in
places
○ How to recognize and interpret at different scales the relationships among patterns and
processes
○ How to define regions and evaluate the regionalization process
○ How to characterize and analyze changing interconnections among places
○ Use of geospatial technologies, such as GIS, remote sensing, global positioning systems (GPS),
○ and online maps
○ Sources of geographical information and ideas: the field, census data, online data, aerial
○ photography, and satellite imagery
○ Identification of major world regions
Unit II: Population & Migration Patterns and Processes
- Geographical analysis of population
○ Density, distribution, and scale
○ Implications of various densities and distributions
○ Composition: age, sex, income, education, and ethnicity
○ Patterns of fertility, mortality, and health
- Population growth and decline over time and space
○ Historical trends and projections for the future
○ Theories of population growth and decline, including the Demographic Transition Model ○
Regional variations of demographic transition
○ Effects of national population policies: promoting population growth in some countries or
reducing fertility rates in others
○ Environmental impacts of population change on water use, food supplies, biodiversity, the
atmosphere, and climate
○ Population and natural hazards: impacts on policy, economy, and society
- Migration
○ Types of migration: transnational, internal, chain, step, seasonal agriculture (e.g.,
transhumance), and rural to urban ○ Major historical migrations
○ Push and pull factors, and migration in relation to employment and quality of life
○ Refugees, asylum seekers, and internally displaced persons
○ Consequences of migration: socioeconomic, cultural, environmental, and political;
immigration policies; remittances
Unit III: Cultural Patterns and Processes
- Concepts of culture
○ Culture traits
○ Diffusion patterns
○ Acculturation, assimilation, and multiculturalism
○ Cultural region, vernacular regions, and culture hearths
○ Globalization and the effects of technology on cultures
- Cultural differences and regional patterns
○ Language and communications
○ Religion and sacred space
○ Ethnicity and nationalism
○ Cultural differences in attitudes toward gender
○ Popular and folk culture
○ Cultural conflicts, and law and policy to protect culture
- Cultural landscapes and cultural identity
○ Symbolic landscapes and sense of place
○ The formation of identity and place making
○ Differences in cultural attitudes and practices toward the environment
○ Indigenous peoples
Unit IV: Political Organization of Space
- Territorial dimensions of politic
○ The concepts of political power and territoriality
○ The nature, meaning, and function of boundaries
○ Influences of boundaries on identity, interaction, and exchange
○ Federal and unitary states, confederations, centralized government, and forms of governance
○ Spatial relationships between political systems and patterns of ethnicity, economy, and
gender
○ Political ecology: impacts of law and policy on the environment and environmental justice
- Evolution of the contemporary political pattern
○ The nation-state concept
○ Colonialism and imperialism
○ Democratization
○ Fall of communism and legacy of the Cold War
○ Patterns of local, regional, and metropolitan governance
- Changes and challenges to political-territorial arrangements
○ Changing nature of sovereignty
○ Fragmentation, unification, and cooperation
○ Supranationalism and international alliances
○ Devolution of countries: centripetal and centrifugal forces
○ Electoral geography: redistricting and gerrymandering
○ Armed conflicts, war, and terrorism
* Semester I Final (Units 1-4 only) *
The final is a written exam that includes 50 multiple choice questions and 2 FRQs.
Unit V: Agriculture, Food Production, and Rural Land Use
- Development and diffusion of agriculture
○ Neolithic Agricultural Revolution
○ Second Agricultural Revolution
○ Green Revolution
○ Large-scale commercial agriculture and agribusiness
- Major agricultural production regions
○ Agricultural systems associated with major bioclimatic zones
○ Variations within major zones and effects of markets
○ Interdependence among regions of food production and consumption
- Rural land use and settlement patterns
○ Models of agricultural land use, including von Thünen's model
○ Settlement patterns associated with major agriculture types: subsistence, cash cropping,
plantation, mixed farming, monoculture, pastoralism, ranching, forestry, fishing and
aquaculture
○ Land use/land cover change: irrigation, desertification, deforestation, wetland destruction,
conservation efforts to protect or restore natural land cover, and global impacts.
○ Roles of women in agricultural production and farming communities
- Issues in contemporary commercial agriculture
○ Biotechnology, including genetically modified organisms (GMO)
○ Spatial organization of industrial agriculture, including the transition in land use to large scale
commercial farming and factors affecting the location of processing facilities.
○ Environmental issues: soil degradation, overgrazing, river and aquifer depletion, animal
wastes, and extensive fertilizer and pesticide use
○ Organic farming, crop rotation, value-added specialty foods, regional appellations, fair trade,
and eat-local-food movements.
○ Global food distribution, malnutrition, and famine
Unit VI: Cities and Urban Land Use
- Development and character of cities
○ Origin of cities; site and situation characteristics
○ Forces driving urbanization
○ Borchert's epochs of urban transportation development
○ World cities and megacities
○ Suburbanization processes
- Models of urban hierarchies: reasons for the distribution and size of cities
○ Gravity model
○ Christaller's central place theory
○ Rank-size rule
○ Primate cities
- Models of internal city structure and urban development: strengths and limitations of models
○ Burgess concentric zone model
○ Hoyt sector model
○ Harris and Ullman multiple nuclei model
○ Galactic city model
○ Models of cities in Latin America, North Africa and the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, East
Asia, and South Asia
- Built environment and social space Types of residential buildings
○ Transportation and utility infrastructure
○ Political organization of urban areas
○ Urban planning and design (e.g., gated communities, New Urbanism, and smart-growth
policies)
○ Census data on urban ethnicity, gender, migration, and socioeconomic status
○ Characteristics and types of edge cities: boomburbs, greenfields, uptowns
- Contemporary urban issues
○ Housing and insurance discrimination, and access to food stores
○ Changing demographic, employment, and social structures
○ Uneven development, zones of abandonment, disamenity, and gentrification
○ Suburban sprawl and urban sustainability problems: land and energy use, cost of expanding
public education services, home financing and debt crises
○ Urban environmental issues: transportation, sanitation, air and water quality, remediation of
brownfields, and farmland protection
Unit VII: Industrialization and Economic Development
- Growth and diffusion of industrialization
○ The changing roles of energy and technology
○ Industrial Revolution
○ Models of economic development: Rostow's Stages of Economic Growth and Wallerstein's
World Systems Theory
○ Geographic critiques of models of industrial location: bid rent, Weber’s comparative costs of
transportation and industrial location in relation to resources, location of retailing and service
industries, and local economic development within competitive global systems of
corporations and finance
- Social and economic measures of development
○ Gross domestic product and GDP per capita
○ Human Development Index
○ Gender Inequality Index
○ Income disparity and the Gini coefficient
○ Changes in fertility and mortality
○ Access to health care, education, utilities, and sanitation
- Contemporary patterns and impacts of industrialization and development
○ Spatial organization of the world economy
○ Variations in levels of development (uneven development)
○ Deindustrialization, economic restructuring, and the rise of service and high technology
economies
○ Globalization, manufacturing in newly industrialized countries (NICs), and the international
division of labor
○ Natural resource depletion, pollution, and climate change
○ Sustainable development
○ Government development initiatives: local, regional, and national policies
○ Women in development and gender equity in the workforce
*Review for AP Human Geography Test May 7, 2024
*Please Do not hesitate to contact us if there is a concern or a problem. While teaching styles may differ, the material and all major grades are exactly the same.