Diffusion Activity

Good morning, World Geography teachers!

Last week I taught about diffusion. To explain the idea of globalization of American culture and diffusion of culture, I used a lesson I created about McDonalds. I started the lesson teaching about cultural diffusion patterns. To reinforce this, I did the following activity with my students:

1) Put a timeline of McDonald's history on the power point slide - from the creation of the first McDonalds to it being bought by Ray Kroc to it expanding outside the US to the number of McDonald's worldwide today

2) Put this map on the board - it shows the diffusion of McDonald's around the world. The initial location countries are red (Canada and the US), the first phase of expansion is orange (Australia, Great Britain, Japan, Panama), and so on.
- on this slide, I had the students interpret the map to understand how to read the map
- we then talked about why certain countries got McDonald's before others (cultural connections like military bases, common background, etc)\
- we talked about which countries still did not have McDonald's and why (poverty, negative feelings about the US, etc)

3) Used the book What the World Eats (purchased with Title One money from my school) to get statistics on the number of McDonald's worldwide. I chose 7 countries and used their 2003 data:

•Australia – 726
•China – 602
•Ecuador – 10
•Egypt – 40
•Mexico – 261
•Turkey – 81
•United States – 13, 491

I had students take the data and make a bar graph to display the number of McDonald's in certain countries worldwide.

4) For fun, I showed pictures of McDonald's around the world and how they've adapted their architecture for the different societies. Also, I showed example menus from McDonald's around the world (for example, the Maharaja McChicken sandwich in India, where they don't eat beef).



**Note: when teaching about food in our study of culture, here is a great website - it is a TIME series from the author of Hungry Planet that has a slideshow of families with their food for the week. It would be great to show on our smartboards http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1626519,00.html

Posted by Kathryn Jasper, Central HS