A Larger Intellectual Landscape
The idea of an “intellectual landscape” for your writing comes from an article on Common Core and the state of public schools:
In pre-kindergarten, for instance, students should learn to form an opinion about an experience or a text. By first grade, they should be able to give reasons that explain their opinions. From third grade to sixth grade, they should learn to structure their arguments in an essay. And as they move through junior high and high school, students should learn to map their ideas onto a larger intellectual landscape and make the crucial move of acknowledging and engaging opposing arguments.
Throughout it all, students learn that arguing is not synonymous with fighting — its primary goal is not to destroy contradicting viewpoints, but to engage them in a way that reveals hidden dimensions of a problem.
~Gerald Graff & Steve Benton, “Great Teachers Can’t Save America’s Schools”
The term for for this kind of engagement with other viewpoints and ideas is dialectical, which you should understand as a push away from exposition and toward argumentative discourse.