UWEC Academic Goals, Portfolio, and Vogeler's GE courses

UWEC Baccalaureate (General Education) Goals This course addressed all five UWEC Baccalaureate (General Education) goals:
1.	Knowledge of Human Culture and the Natural World -- The Cultural Landscapes of North America course is fundamentally knowledge based. Facts from both the environmental and social realms at varying geographical scales come together in this distinctive discipline. Lectures, readings, and extensive photos are used to establish the facts from which knowledge is derived. The cultural landscape consists of topography, vegetation, human structures, and the resulting settlement patterns -- all of these natural and human aspects are explicitly examined in the lectures and the topographic map exercises.
2.	Creative and Critical Thinking -- The richly illustrated class lectures and the readings require critical thinking to determine the nature of cultural landscapes -- how they are constructed, what they mean to different groups, and what humans do with these landscapes. Cultural landscapes do not simply exist, but are created and interpreted by different cultural groups.
3.	Effective Communication -- This course relies heavily on photos and maps to demonstrated effective communication skills. Students are expected to create maps which effectively communicate their geographical ideas.
4.	Individual and Social Responsibility -- This course examines the cultural landscapes of North America through the lens of explicit and implicit national values regarding how individuals, groups, and nations have and "should" relate to each other.
5.	Respect for Diversity among People -- The very essence of cultural landscapes expresses cultural values of diverse groups. How different groups, with varying power, relate to each ultimately results on the actual and perceived cultural landscapes. This course deals with how religious, ethnic, and racial groups have placed their imprints on landscapes and to identify the salient features of the landscape of oppression, by race and sex. This course is taught from a cultural diversity perspective; hence, students get two UWEC cultural diversity credits.