Educational Innovation and the Market for Geographers in Hungary

This paper examines the status of geography in higher education in Hungary. Stress is placed on reforms begun in the 1990s to launch new curricula for training professional geographers. The authors played an important role in developing this new curriculum by introducing new subjects into geography programmes, working out the scope and sequence of courses, obtaining accreditation and carrying out market research for graduates. The project was motivated by a decline in demand for geography and geography teachers in secondary schools accompanied by an increase in demand for geographers trained to work in public administration, government and business. The graduates of the new professional geographer curriculum receive a practice-oriented education designed to cultivate their spatial problem solving and applied geographical skills. In this paper the authors present the steps in the curriculum reform and suggest that it may serve as a model for reform in a number of nearby countries planning to join the EU.     

Reflecting on Reflective Learning: The case of geography,earth and environmental sciences

This paper examines how reflective learning can be promoted and developed explicitly within the disciplines of geography, earth and environmental sciences. A review of various theoretical perspectives on reflection is provided, as well as a brief summary of the ways of incorporating reflection in the curriculum. The substantive part of this paper is based on a UK Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN) Subject Centre for Geography, Earth and Environmental Science (GEES) funded research project on reflective learning which was completed in 2001. A questionnaire survey was sent to GEES departments/schools to obtain information about the incorporation of reflective learning in the curriculum. From the analysis of the questionnaire returns, the project team identified four themes regarding the relevance of reflective learning to GEES disciplines. Project findings demonstrate how the inclusion of reflective learning exercises and activities is at an embryonic stage in many UK GEES departments/schools. The paper concludes by highlighting certain challenges that geographers, earth and environmental scientists could address if they wish to seek to develop reflective learning and enhance the student learning experience.     

Fieldwork@40: fieldwork in geography higher education

ABSTRACT

Fieldwork is the most powerful learning invitation in the toolkit of Geographical Education. This review of papers in The Journal of Geography in Higher Education (JGHE) suggests seven modes in the development of fieldwork. These are arrayed as a kind of historical, perhaps evolutionary, sequence but most remain current in Geography fieldwork practice. At the far end (1960s) of the sequence are didactic modes that are teacher centred and use the field as an adjunct to the classroom, in the middle (1990s) are modes that involve active learning and focus on the development of students as investigators and at the near end (2010s) are those that centred on the field study area and its qualities, that involve concern about the ethics of student engagement and that employ blended learning technologies. The review charts the JGHE’s gradual shift away from its original, almost exclusively, UK-focus toward something rather more international and inclusive. Fieldwork is where Geographers learn “from doing” Geography to “do” Geography. Its special attributes include providing experiential, sometimes transformative, learning through the immersion of the learner in the field experience. In 40 years, JGHE has helped Geography Fieldwork move from the margins of the curriculum to its current place at its core.     

Infrastructuring Public Sector Innovation: Challenging Municipal Work Practices in Copenhagen

Abstract

In a complex and changing field, influenced by globalization, technological development, and increased differentiation and complexity in all parts of society, urban planners are increasingly required to rethink and innovate the way they manage and develop cities. As the contemporary focus on public sector innovation and “liveability” in cities gains momentum, the pressure on planners to re-invent their practices is becoming an interesting focal point for urban studies and raises the question of how research can engage with, and participate in, the development of new urban planning practices. This article reports from the action research project “Create your City”, which intervened in the innovation strategy of the Technical and Environmental Administration of Copenhagen during the period 2011–2013. The article shows how researchers can engage with the contemporary challenges for urban planning by staging interventions that allow planners to imagine the city in new ways, and develop new planning practices in the process. By analysing the infrastructuring of “Create your City”, the article shows how the project contributed to the development of new innovative practices in the administration, and points towards new potentials for scholarly engagement in the field of urban planning.     

The shifting context of academic geography in Canada

Academic geographers are working in a system in flux. A series of interconnecting and overlapping social, political, and economic processes have resulted in a shifting academic climate for geographers and geography departments. This viewpoint brings forward evidence from multiple areas of study to provide a synthesis of this changing context. Challenges to geography include the role of “facts” and “truth” in society, neoliberal university contexts as workplaces, and generational change, among many others. This paper asks more questions than it answers, with an aim to promote an engaged and informed debate among geographers about our “place” in Canada's shifting academic context.     

Reform and Resistance: A Consideration of Space,Scale and Strategy in Legal Challenges to Welfare Reform

This paper examines the law as a mechanism for resisting neoliberal policy change through a consideration of legal challenges to welfare reform in the United States. The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 marked a sea change in both the content and scale of the American social welfare system. It has entailed a downward shift in policy creation and administration from the national to the state and local level, and conveys a heavy emphasis on the “responsibility” of single mothers to engage in waged labor. In addition to changing the scale at which the social welfare system operates, welfare reform has changed how the more oppressive aspects of this policy might be resisted. While some legal advocates are challenging welfare reform by working within the “policy scale”, others are invoking national level protections by appealing to Civil Rights legislation. By working against the scale imposed by neoliberal social policy, Civil Rights legislation presents the possibility for advocates to “re‐scale responsibility” from that of single mothers to submit to wage labor in order to survive, to the government’s responsibility to protect its citizens against identity‐based discrimination. Herein, I argue both that the law can serve as an important mechanism for re‐focusing the scale of resistance in efforts to challenge oppressive social policy; and that even in the face of policy that imposes a local scale, the national level holds potential as an important terrain of resistance.     

Field-based learning: the challenge of practising participatory knowledge

In 2009, Geography at National University of Ireland, Galway, launched a new taught master's programme, the MA in Environment, Society and Development. The vision for the programme was to engage students in the analysis and critique of the array of interventionary practices of development and securitization in our contemporary world. A range of modules were set up focusing on a number of interrelated concerns, including “geopolitics and security”, “environment and risk” and “managing development”. These core themes are approached from a number of critical perspectives, including political ecology, critical geopolitics and political economy. A key additional aim from the outset was to go beyond solely academic critique to consider participatory forms of development knowledge and practice that can emerge from “field-based learning”. To this end, a module entitled “field-based learning” was initiated, involving a 12-week seminar course in Galway, followed by a week-long fieldwork programme in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, where each year approximately 15 students intersect with the development work of local community leaders, the UN, EU and a variety of NGOs, civil society organizations and public advocacy groups. In this paper, we outline some of the key challenges of initiating and practising such a grounded and often unsystematic approach to learning in the field. We reflect, in particular, on the complexities involved in seeking to facilitate and practise critical participatory knowledges that comprise both academic and civic engagement values.     

“An Ægyptian darknesse”: pagan chronologies,historia sacra,and the hieroglyph in England, 1646-1690

ABSTRACT

In this article I consider the depiction of the Egyptian hieroglyph in several seventeenth-century English religio-historiographical works that engage with the problems posed by the Egyptian dynastic records – records that challenged the validity of biblical chronology. Critical tradition has been keen to view the hieroglyph in the context of esoteric European scholarship, while scholarship on the English Enlightenment has tended to overlook the importance of religious motivations in “secular” intellectual projects. I show here, however, that some of the first apparently “secular” approaches to the hieroglyphs in England were not in works that espoused proto-Enlightenment linguistics or other intellectual ideals, but in religiously-motivated projects that, seeking to buttress sacred history and the primacy of the Judaic tradition against the threat of pagan chronologies, aimed to discredit the hieroglyph as an icon of pagan learning.     

Experimenting with Active Learning in Geography: Dispelling the Myths that Perpetuate Resistance

While some geographers have embraced active learning as a means to engage students in a course, many others stick to conventional teaching methods. They are often deterred by suggestions that it can be difficult to implement active learning where students have no prior knowledge of a subject, that active learning requires too much work of lecturers and students, and that there are significant institutional constraints to implementing active learning. In this article the authors draw on their experiences of utilizing active learning in five different countries before dispelling myths which continue to constrain the uptake of active learning methods. Finally, they provide simple guidelines for successful integration of active learning in geography courses.     

Avoiding the “F” word: feminist geography in Iran

Abstract

Little attention has been given to how feminist geography is defined, applied, and taught in non-Anglophone countries, especially in Muslim majority societies where Women’s Rights are quite different from the western world. The case of Iran among other Middle Eastern countries becomes even more isolated due to the several political, linguistic, and cultural limitations opposed on Iranian academics and international collaborations after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Women make half of Iran’s 80 million population, 63% of university graduates, almost half of informal workers, 30% of Iranian professors, 13% of high level management position holders, and under 5% of the Islamic Majlis (Iran’s Parliament). However, feminist geography, the sub-discipline that has been traditionally dedicated to the inclusion of gender as an analytical lens within Geography, is not a recognized field at any departments in Iran. This essay aims to present the current status of feminist geographic research and teaching at selected Iranian Universities. My goal is to offer a better understanding of how the local social and political context affect what constitute feminist geographic work and how geographers navigate the political and hierarchal university systems to engage in gender studies. Through informal interviews via emails and Skype with several Iranian geographers, I illustrate why Iranian geographers often avoid using “feminist” terminology in recognizing their work, even though their work is feminist.     

Practicing Faith in Public Life

Abstract

Miroslav Volf’s book, A Public Faith: How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good, offers a valuable guide to how people of faith can engage in politics by calling on the best of their traditions, holding modest expectations, and remaining nonviolent. From the perspective of Catholic Social Teaching, Volf’s model can be viewed as appropriately, but cautiously hopeful. Yet, given contemporary suspicion of religion in politics, the challenges of acting prophetically in a pluralistic society, and the responsibility of Christians to “be the church,” it may be wise to begin with local actions rather than hoping to change the world by political means.     

The Senzai Maru's visit to Shanghai and its understanding of China

ABSTRACT

The significance of the Senzai Maru’s 1862 journey to Shanghai was great. From this opportunity, Japan not only learned from its neighbor the danger of closing off one’s borders and refusing to change, but also the importance of expanding its horizons and “learning from the world.” From these lessons, Japan transitioned from “expelling barbarians” toward “enlightenment,” from conservative to “reformist.” After successfully overthrowing the Tokugawa shogunate, Japan’s Meiji reforms thrived.     

Communities and archaeology under the Soufrière Hills Volcano on Montserrat,West Indies

Abstract

The volcanically devastated landscape of Montserrat and its social fabric comprise what Maria calls a “traumascape”—a site of tragedy and catastrophe that is also a place of coping and resilience. How Montserratians engage with trauma is evident in how they remember their recent and historical pasts, and in how they are reinventing aspects of their heritage in order to sustain a distinctly Montserratian identity for the future. Such a process of coping presents challenges for conducting archaeology in collaboration with the community. In this article, we describe the experiences of a recently established project on the island (Survey and Landscape Archaeology on Montserrat) and discuss the potential for, and the obstacles involved in, developing longer-term, sustainable forms of collaboration between archaeologists and local Montserratian communities when facing the unusual circumstances of volcanic disaster and hazard.     

Historical geography and the society/nature “problematic”: the perspective of J. F. Schouw,G. P. Marsh and E. Reclus

The “retreat” of the recent past within geography to a conception of the discipline as an ahistoric science which is either spatial or ecological is seen to be an atavism—a throwback to a disciplinary framework or “problematic” which dichotomizes human society and nature into fixed exclusive categories. This essay explores an alternative “problematic” which integrates society's spatial and ecological dimensions in a study of the historical process of “dialectical” interaction between society and its geographic environment, and the political and economic consequences of this interaction. The significance of this alternative approach is elucidated through an examination of its emergence, at the time of the origins of modern geography in the early nineteenth century. Its developing importance for the present-day position of the discipline is exemplified in the work of three prominent, socially engaged, nineteenth-century geographers. Although these geographers have tended to be either ignored or misunderstood in the recent literature, their approach has much to offer the field at a time when its division into ahistoric spatial and ecological disciplines is being questioned.     

Negative heritage: the material-cultural politics of the American haunted history tour

ABSTRACT

This article assesses the defining features and cultural significance of the haunted history tour as it has come to be practiced in American urban spaces. A distinctive cultural form that has risen to prominence in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and other places, haunted history taps into public fascinations with “dark” history and ghosts, but does so to engage unresolved and troubling elements of local history and memory. Practitioners engage creatively with problematic histories that otherwise might be forgotten or suppressed, attending especially to their material-folkloric traces. Drawing on participatory and analytical research in several U.S. cities, in particular St. Louis, New York, and Savannah, the article moves from a characterization of the defining modes and interpretative conventions of haunted history, which are drawn from mainstream tourism and others from more-activist public history, to an analysis of its preoccupation with haunting “remainders” of the past, which, I contend, form an unacknowledged narrative and epistemological core of an experimental memory project whose primary quarry is the domain of “negative heritage”.     

First year on the faculty: the quality of their teaching

Abstract

This article considers the arguments being advanced in the USA for an expansion of academic programmes incorporating service‐learning, in which students undertake, as part of their studies, community service, and engage in academic activities designed to provide a context for reflection on their experience in doing so. Three arguments are usually advanced for this: the merits of experiential education, the value of service‐learning in education for citizenship, and its significance in promoting a sense of ‘community’. Some examples are given and the issues raised by these programmes are explored briefly. It is suggested that geography could profit from incorporating elements of service‐learning in order to enhance its treatment of moral and political issues.     

Where Will Europe End? Ukraine and the Limits of European Integration

In an exploratory essay, two geographers assess long-term prospects for Ukraine's integration into European economic and political structures, most notably the European Union. The analysis is based on an examination of such commonly cited yardsticks as economic reform, political liberalization, and efforts to combat corruption (“internal obstacles”) as well as geographic factors such as relative location, production structure, and commercial relations (“external obstacles”). Efforts to upgrade and, to some degree, reorient transportation linkages to facilitate connection with Europe are investigated as well. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: F40, 010, 018. 3 figures, 3 tables, 42 references.     

Learning by ‘design’: how undergraduates in Singapore learn to become engineers

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we explore the evolving norms and dispositions of creativity and enterprise of engineering students using data gathered from a newly established technology and engineering-focused university called ‘UniTech’ located in Singapore. Based on interviews with students, we seek to explain (1) what they learn, reject, adopt and appropriate; (2) the kinds of challenges they face and (3) the unexpected and serendipitous outcomes of their learning. Through an integrated engineering curriculum focusing on design, students learn to be technically competent, creative and entrepreneurial persons. This paper considers how the curriculum works as a set of formal procedures preparing students for a future ‘knowledge-based economy’ imagined to be technology-intensive, dynamic and filled with opportunities but also increasingly uncertain. We analyse how students at UniTech negotiate this design-focused curriculum where experiences of creativity, open-ended possibilities and holistic perspectives intersect with the national economic agenda of a knowledge-based economy.     

Telling stories: Exploring research storytelling as a meaningful approach to knowledge mobilization with Indigenous research collaborators and diverse audiences in community‐based participatory research

A growing number of geographers seek to communicate their research to audiences beyond the academy. Community‐based and participatory action research models have been developed, in part, with this goal in mind. Yet despite many promising developments in the way research is conducted and disseminated, researchers continue to seek methods to better reflect the “culture and context” of the communities with whom they work. During my doctoral research on homelessness in the Northwest Territories, I encountered a significant disconnect between the emotive, personal narratives of homelessness that I was collecting and more conventional approaches to research dissemination. In search of a method of dissemination to engage more meaningfully with research collaborators as well as the broader public, I turned to my creative writing work. In this article, I draw from “The komatik lesson” to discuss my first effort at research storytelling. I suggest that research storytelling is particularly well suited to community‐based participatory research, as we explore methods to present findings in ways that are more culturally appropriate to the communities in which the research takes place. This is especially so in collaborative research with Indigenous communities, where storytelling and knowledge sharing are often one and the same. However, I also discuss the ways in which combining my creative writing interests with my doctoral research has been an uneasy fit, forcing me to question how to tell a good story while giving due diligence to the role that academic research has played in its development. Drawing on the outcomes and challenges I encountered, I offer an understanding of what research storytelling is, and how it might be used to advance community‐based participatory research with Indigenous communities.     

Changemakers and change agents: encouraging students as researchers through Changemaker’s programmes

Abstract

This paper examines the role played by a student-organized research conference in the age of research-led teaching and active learning. Drawing on our experiences of organizing two departmental conferences in Geography in March 2016 and March 2017, we begin to outline how institutional support and funding for student-led “Changemakers” projects can not only introduce students to specific aspects of research (in the case of our conference, to disseminating and communicating research findings), but also encourage collaboration and mutual support outside of formal staff-student hierarchies of teaching, learning and marking.