A self‐paced mastery instruction scheme in geography for a first year university course

Abstract

The use of a self‐paced mastery system of instruction can help to overcome some of the problems resulting from variable educational backgrounds among first‐year geography undergraduates. The implementation of such a system at Carleton University is described, at the stages of specification, design and evaluation. The aim of ‘mastering’ subject material is achieved through a programme taken at the students’ own pace and self‐assessed. The preliminary results of an evaluation of the system suggest that more students progress to the second year because of it, though there is no significant improvement in the overall performance of second‐year students.     

Managing Conservation of the Built Heritage in Post‐socialist Budapest: Evidence from the Old Jewish Quarter

Like other Eastern European countries, Hungary has undergone processes of societal and economic restructuring since 1990. This has given rise to a changed cultural‐political context shaped by forces such as (re)privatisation, strengthening of local government and growth of civil movements. This has led to new opportunities as well as challenges for managing conservation of the built heritage. In Budapest, protection of the built heritage is achieved either through state protection of outstanding ‘monuments’ or through conservation objectives dictated by planning authorities within a two‐tiered local government system. These different levels of conservation authority can sometimes lead to conflicting approaches, as in the case of recent urban renewal in the Old Jewish Quarter. This paper examines the approach to urban conservation taken in Budapest at the various official levels, as well as organised initiatives by the voluntary sector in the light of post‐socialism and associated cultural change.     

Post‐conflict Heritage and Tourism in Cambodia: The Burden of Angkor

The World Heritage Site of Angkor is enduring one of the most crucial, turbulent periods in its 1200‐year history. Since the early 1990s over 20 countries have contributed millions of dollars to help safeguard and restore its temples. As one of Southeast Asia’s premier destinations, Angkor has also seen a 10,000% growth in international tourist arrivals in just over a decade. The challenges arising from the intense convergence of these two paradoxical and unstable agendas—heritage conservation and tourism development—are greatly compounded by Cambodia’s need to recover from war and turmoil. This paper explores the critical trends that have surfaced at Angkor and why the challenges posed by surging tourism have been inadequately addressed. It argues Angkor’s dominant role within Cambodia’s post‐conflict heritage and tourism industries requires closer, more critical attention given recent events in the country. This article is the summary of Winter's book Post‐conflict Heritage, Post‐colonial Tourism (Routledge 2007).     

The Archaeological Survey of India and Communal Violence in Post‐independence India

This article argues that that the discipline of archaeology as practised by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) significantly contributed to communal violence in post‐Independence India. The essay investigates several legacies handed down from the colonial ASI to the post‐Independence ASI, with a goal of explaining the contribution of archaeology to the ongoing disturbances at Ayodhyā in Uttar Pradesh. The colonial ASI was marked by four characteristics: it was a monument‐based archaeology based on geographical surveys, literary traditions and Orientalist scholarship. These four characteristics combined to form a traditionalist, location‐driven excavation agenda that privileged specific holy sites in the post‐Partition era, sustaining the violent disagreements between Hindu and Islamic populations of India and Pakistan.     

Pioneer Living 1963 Style: Imaginations of Heritage in a Post‐war Canadian Suburb

This article connects the origins of a Canadian living history museum to the cultural and social developments of 1960s suburban Canada. Although there exists a strong literature on heritage and commemoration in Canada (and around the world), few scholars have looked explicitly at museums in that country. The literature on history museums elsewhere in the world is stronger. However, despite the strengths of this international literature, its focus has been on the use of museums in the present. An important aspect of the use of heritage, the historical contexts in which past museum visitors interpreted museum themes and displays, has not received much attention. This article argues that museum patrons of the 1960s, the decade in which many living history museums were founded, saw pioneer villages in the context of their own modernising lifestyles. However much Black Creek Pioneer Village might reflect anxiety about the direction of modernity, it also framed the past in ways that legitimated modern, suburban living.     

Attempts at an Arab‐Jewish agreement in Palestine during the thirties

The article argues that a central aspect of Israeli-Polish relations before 1967 was their tripartite nature, involving the two states and Polish Jewry. The main goal of Israeli diplomacy in Poland, to which it subordinated a variety of interests, even those that were central to Israel's foreign policy, was the immigration to Israel of Polish Jewry. The three elements of the triangular relations (Israel, Poland, and Polish Jewry) influenced one another through their policy and behavior, monitored each other, interpreted each other's actions, and reacted accordingly. The aliyah from Poland engendered a new dynamic in the relations. Israel was able to implement its nation-building policy through the immigration of a desired element, and the Polish authorities, by allowing emigration of an unassimilable ethnonational minority, homogenized the nationalizing Polish state. After the massive emigration of the Jews, another element connecting and reshaping the three sides of the triangle emerged: the competition to represent the memory of Polish Jewry, conceived, too, as an instrument in the nation-building process of both states.     

Adjustment or renewal in regional clusters? A study of diversification amongst SMEs in the Aberdeen oil complex

A renewed interest in the spatial clustering or agglomeration of economic activity is evident within economic geography and related fields. This paper considers processes of change within 'mature' regional clusters, developing a conceptual framework which links firm-level strategies to development scenarios at the cluster level through a set of intervening mechanisms. Whange, enabling the cluster to sustain its prosperity, and adjustment which is associated with stagnation and gradual decline. This conceptual framework is applied to an analysis of one key mechanism of change, diversification, as pursued by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the Aberdeen oil cluster. Our analysis indicates that some diversification is occurring, with the implications for the cluster lying midway between adjustment and renewal. In conclusion, we emphasize the need to assess and 'unpack' the clusters concept and suggest that research should focus on the relationships between proximity, learning and evolution.     

A study of social‐market interventions in the shaping of the field of cultural production

A social analysis based on extensive evaluation of the Dance and Drama Awards programme reveals the social‐market political paradigm underpinning the formation of cultural policy in the UK underthe New Labour government. This specific intervention in the field of cultural production is placed in the context of broader government interventions in the cultural domain that seek to give respect to undervalued social and cultural groups. There is a political analysis of the characteristics of the social‐market political formation that underpin New Labour’s “affirmative” actions, and the political strategies informing the government’s “access” and “inclusion” agendas and their impact on the cultural and creative industries. The authors argue that the construction of a “social‐market” position in New Labour’s cultural policy represents an attempt to bridge or “hyphenate” the contradictory claims of social democracy, on the one hand, and economic fatalism, on the other. Despite the rhetoric of social and cultural “transformation”, the authors argue that a “faith” in the market prevents New Labour from transforming the political‐economic and cultural structures that generate economic and cultural injustices.