Geographers in Their Ivory Tower: Academic Geography and Popular Geography in Paris 1931

Abstract: French academic geography achieved remarkable success during the 1920s making Paris an appropriate location for the XIIIth International Geographical Congress to meet in 1931. These scholarly activities were counterpoised by expressions of an exotic 'popular geography' at the great Exposition Coloniale staged in the French capital at the same time. At the Congress, French academics displayed their research achievements in denudation chronology, rural settlement studies and cartography, extending their work from the Hexagon to parts of the Empire. Patronage by leading professors in Paris and Grenoble clearly played a vital role in shaping the discipline. The location and content of excursions for visiting scholars also highlighted French achievements and suggested what remained to be done. Scrutiny of activities at the XIIIth IGC reveals a profession whose official pronouncements appear isolated from the momentous economic and political changes triggered by global depression at that time.     

Exhibiting the Field for Learning: Telling New York's Stories

This paper explores the challenges of engaging and assessing students in residential field learning. Fieldwork presents students with complex learning environments, wherein they are asked to participate in a variety of learning activities. Difficulties arise, however, over how to sustain engagement in field learning while simultaneously capturing and nurturing its different dimensions within assessment. Drawing on debates over student engagement and assessment for learning, this paper argues that engagement and assessment must coalesce for effective learning to occur. It is suggested that ‘exhibitions’ which develop the concept of ‘storytelling’ are a powerful way of promoting engagement and assessment for learning.     

A Research-Led,Inquiry-Based Learning Experiment: Classic Landforms of Deglaciation,Glen Etive,Scottish Highlands

This paper reports an adaptation of a classroom-based, traditionally taught module to both facilitate field-based knowledge acquisition and contribute towards research. The module enabled students, through a combination of new research and co-learning, to achieve the original classroom-based learning outcomes. Students engaged enthusiastically with the research project, developing a deeper learning style as demonstrated by improved student performance and a sense of ownership of the learning experience. The study concludes that field-centred, inquiry-based learning draws heavily upon staff resources but is an effective means of facilitating teaching and research in tandem.     

The Interview Hurdle to Postgraduate Studies and the Job Market

Abstract

This paper explores the educational value of a rural trail—a field visit on foot—using as an example a trail in a small area of countryside near Lancaster in northern England. This trail provides those teaching rural geography in higher education with a means of developing their students’ skills of informed observation and interpretation of field evidence based on study and discussion on‐site. A trail can enhance the appreciation and teaching of conceptual matters such as cultural approaches to rural geography. It also encourages the integration of diverse theoretical approaches to rural studies (based on culture, planning and management) and the simultaneous consideration by students of both local (often personal) details and national (or even global) pressures for change. The paper concludes that the rural trail has considerable pedagogical and academic merit for rural geographers.     

Teaching historical geography in the field

This paper examines the pedagogical and practical challenges associated with teaching historical geography, and archival research specifically, in the context of the undergraduate field trip. In so doing, it draws upon students' own reflections on the experience of conducting archival research during a field trip to New York City and presents the results of an international survey of academics' views as to the current problems and future possibilities associated with the teaching of historical geography and the implications of these perspectives for future curriculum design.     

Responses to classroom needs: the US Census Bureau's college curriculum support project

Abstract

An approach to improving teaching is described which consists of simply offering teachers a wide range of alternative classroom techniques. Extracts from two collections of teaching techniques, on lecturing and on seminars and tutorials, are presented and commented on to illustrate the approach. Doubts concerning the advisability of offering ‘tips’ to teachers are discussed.     

中国历史地貌学开创者张修桂先生学术贡献述评

张修桂先生是中国历史地貌学的开创者和中国历史自然地理学的奠基人之一。他以现代地貌学理论为指导,综合利用多源数据,辅以实地考察,深入解读有关环境变迁的历史文献,为历史地貌学创建了一套独特的研究方法、研究范式与话语体系。他对长江中下游河床地貌演变的研究,自成一体,兼具中国特色,其成果堪称中国历史地貌学的扛鼎之作。有关海河形成、黄河下游变迁、长江中下游湖泊演变及上海成陆的研究在谭其骧先生的基础上,又提出诸多见解。这些研究贯穿古今,促进并深化了我国历史地貌学的发展,是现代地理学与历史地理学的有机结合的典范,也是历史地理学科经世致用的具体体现。他还参与我国现存最早最精美汉代地图的复原和研究,为古地图的拼复提供了关键论证,确保了对该图最大限度的正确复原。他关于古地图的研究和应用亦为地图内史与外史研究奠定了一定基础。     

Jules Sion,Alan Grant Ogilvie and the college des Ecossais in Montpellier: A network of geographers

The ‘new geography’ propounded by Vidal de La Blache in the early years of the 20th century was diffused by his protégés in France and abroad. Field classes played a significant role in the process, with the Collège des Ecossais, established by Patrick Geddes at Montpellier, providing an ideal base for British students to study the natural and cultural landscapes of the component pays of southern France. The careers of Jules Sion and Alan Grant Ogilvie are explored in this article, and practical links between French and British geographers are exemplified through experiences of fieldwork in the Languedoc before and after World War II. Networks of professional contact and friendship are vital in understanding how the practice of modern geography has been shaped.     

Teaching Across the Divide: Physical and Human Geographies of Hurricane Katrina

This article critically reflects on our effort to ‘teach across the divide’, by integrating physical and human geography in a new first-year course. We achieved this integration by structuring our course around a series of key events, in order to draw out the interaction of ‘natural’ and ‘social’ forces. After setting out the intellectual and institutional reasons for integration, we illustrate our approach with reference to one of the key events covered in our course: Hurricane Katrina. Finally, we draw on our own reflections and student evaluations to consider the positive outcomes of our approach, and the challenges it poses.     

International Perspectives on the Effectiveness of Geography Fieldwork for Learning

Much geographical scholarship on teaching and learning details the intellectual, technical and personal benefits stemming from residential field course offerings, reflecting characteristics of constructivist active learning. With the sustainability of these offerings in question given logistical and political issues, there is greater demand for changes in field course delivery and structure. This paper seeks to expand the range of pedagogical tools, contexts and ways in which geographical field experience can take place. It does so by reconceptualizing ‘the field’ based on the idea of ‘everyday life’ as a meaningful entry point within a classroom context, and as a space of learning in which students construct knowledge for themselves. An empirical investigation of student learning experiences explores the possibility of re-creating the benefits of residential field course offerings in a classroom-based field course.     

Study Abroad Field Trip Improves Test Performance through Engagement and New Social Networks

Although study abroad trips provide an opportunity for affective and cognitive learning, it is largely assumed that they improve learning outcomes. The purpose of this study is to determine whether a study abroad field trip improved cognitive learning by comparing test performance between the study abroad participants (n = 20) and their peers who did not participate (n = 365). Test performance was statistically identical between these groups before and immediately after the study abroad program. On the final exam, the study abroad participants scored significantly higher. Qualitative methods were used to identify increased engagement with the course material and the creation of new social networks as likely explanations.     

Embedding Research-Based Learning Early in the Undergraduate Geography Curriculum

This article discusses attempts to revive gender in the context of the geography curriculum at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. The reluctance of Dutch geography/-ers to embrace gender geography is related to the way in which the discipline has been understood and practised in the past and by whom as well as to the neglect of gender issues at the societal level. Both trajectories may account for a lack of awareness by students and staff of the relevance of gender to Dutch geography.     

Telling small stories: spaces of knowledge and the practice of geography

This article examines how the practice of learning geography, and the arenas in which knowledge-making takes place, can be usefully positioned within changing histories of the discipline. It contends that networks of action – understood through the intersection of social sites, subjects and sources – present a conceptual framework and narrative focus for the re-consideration of specific episodes from geography's past. The interventions made here are informed and illustrated by a 'small story' about the doing of geography. Based on different personal accounts, the story revives a series of events, encounters, dialogues and images dating back to the winter of 1951 at Glenmore Lodge, Scotland. This educational institution in the Cairngorm mountains offered children from urban areas the opportunity to learn field studies and the skills of 'outdoor citizenship'. Initially, the focus falls on Margaret Jack, a 14-year-old field-course participant. Her learning experiences are traced through personal letters, a diary and a field journal dating from that time, and her recent recollections of this event. Margaret's account dovetails with the story of her field studies instructor, Robin Murray. Robin's role is traced through his learning experiences as a geography undergraduate at Aberdeen University, and the recent recollections of Catriona Murray, his wife.     

Video Documentaries in the Assessment of Human Geography Field Courses

This paper critically reviews the use of video documentaries in the assessment of human geography field courses. It aims to contribute to recent debates about the role of visual methods for developing active and deep learning in student-centred teaching. Based on four days of group work in Crete, 30 third-year students produced individual 10-minute video documentaries on ‘Mediterranean Rural Spaces’. Analysing students' experiences of video production highlights the need for innovative teaching and assessment methods and the importance of creating independent and creative students equipped with a broad set of skills for an increasingly flexible job market.     

Constructive comments on D Massey 'Space-time, "science" and the relationship between physical geography and human geography:rsquo;

This paper provides a discussion of Massey's (1999) account of the role of space-time in human and physical geography. Recognizing the relative (but not absolute) paucity of comment from physical geographers on questions of approach and method, the paper seeks to demonstrate three things. First, it casts a history of a narrow part of geomorphology in a similar vein to a part of human geography to demonstrate that it is possible to find strong shared characteristics in the ways in which the two subjects are being approached. This emphasizes the importance of analyses that recognize both space and time in seeking explanation in physical geography and which has important implications for: (i) the nature of laws and processes in geomorphology; and hence (ii) the interpretation of specific landforms and their histories. Second, the paper argues that much of what Massey addresses relates to the closure required to make things amenable to study, something that is characteristic of almost every type of research. This has long been acknowledged in science in general and in physical geography in particular, but is often forgotten. Third, the paper uses this consideration of closure to address the issue of the relational nature of different sorts of space-time models. Following Massey's argument that the sort of space-time model that we adopt needs to be informed by the entities that we study, the paper concludes that some of the space-time models that Massey critiques (e.g. classical Newtonian mechanics) may still be fundamental to what we do, and in no sense necessarily ahistorical.     

场域理论视角下的国际移民研究——以安徽内陆新侨乡为例

论文介绍了场域理论,并运用场域理论对中国内陆山区新侨乡的国际移民潮进行分析。通过对场域、资本和村民＂习性＂的研究,从外在的社会结构和内在的个体心理结构两方面来考察新移民活动,为新侨乡研究提供一种新的观察解读模式。笔者认为新移民场域内资本的流动和转换是推动国际移民潮出现和变化的关键因素。随着各种资本向内陆山区农村的转移,新侨乡的范围和国际移民的数量将会继续扩大。     

A Framework for the Integration of DVD Technology in Geography Teaching and Learning

This article discusses the results when integrating digital versatile disc (DVD) technology in full-time second-year geography for BEd degree students at a university in South Africa, a developing country. It proposes a framework for the integration of the DVD in geography teaching and learning, steered by students’ needs, feedback and observations by the lecturer. The proposed framework recommends clear guidelines on how to integrate the DVD, as well as the interactions between the role players/resources. It also explains how the DVD was compiled, what was included and how it was effectively applied in conjunction with seminars, as an alternative to traditional lectures. An action research design was utilized and both qualitative and quantitative data were collected.     

清代中外西藏阿里的自然地理知识初探

清代西藏阿里地区虽然与中原内地相距绝远,然而在清代前期中央国家的积极努力之下,中原内地对阿里的自然地理知识的获得取得了相当大的成就,尤其是对阿里地区的名山大川的分布及其详情在感性认识层面上达到了相当的高度,然而这种势态没能继续发展下去,从清代中后期开始,这一热情逐渐消退,相关的自然地理知识增长缓慢。另一方面,从清代中后期开始,西方殖民者和探险家进入西藏,对阿里地区进行了一系列的近代地理学的勘测和总结,世人所知的阿里自然地理知识有了迅速发展,形成了一系列丰富的内容。本文拟以清代中原地区的官私著作和西方探险家的考察报告、游记等材料,重现清代西藏阿里自然地理知识的累积过程和发展水平。