Story Map: My Global Barriers – Geography 210: Geographic Dimensions of Human Development

I’m global because I’ve been taught to adopt a global perspective. Operating in this day and age, intimacy is an essential character expectation. Relationships are cross-cultural, immediate and easy to accommodate through the breath of integrated language and effortless technology. Knowing that there’s a necessity to be global, drives a desire to meet and connect with people outside your traditional realm of community. Making yourself uncomfortable is the best way to substantially diversify oneself. Meet someone you don’t know, operate in a community you’re not familiar with, learn how to speak a tongue unfamiliar to your own, crave to educate yourself and better educate your peers, find levels of altruism to truly grasp your role in this reality, and breath. Breathe in the difference and adapt it into your being.

My personal path is illuminated by a yearning to learn. Firs my mother influenced me through her various educational games at the dinner table to pining the world map upon my childhood door. Her influence to embrace the ever-changing world but hold tight to the general practices that shape them and the history that’s forever grounding their future, embedded a passion so deep that my continuation for new knowledge attributes to her. Secondly by my father; a man so focused on winning and being on top that education became a game in which my goal was to compete with my peers for the ultimate victory of academic superiority. Though the quest to valedictorian stardom dissipated through the years of schooling the basis of the goal remained, working to achieve something greater than not only your peers but the ones before in. colloquially parents are the direct attributers of character traits, but in my case, my parents provided a superior drive to engulf a global perspective through the various places they placed me or encouraged me to relocate to in order to become a global citizen.

ac3bx says:

October 1, 2015 at 12:49 pm

I think this map does a superb job of highlighting the interconnectedness of mobility, access, and privilege. This map critiques the unequal development of students in this country, which gave the narrator a different, more informed perspective of how within a region, culture and customs are not always uniform, access is not uniform, and what the implications are because of that. I liked that the last slide address the author’s personal commitment to breaking barriers, however I would have liked to see what the author had in mind in how to break barriers. The title of the map was also intriguing; it was what drove me to view the story map and read the post.