Developing and Embedding Reflective Portfolios in Geography

The School of Geography at the University of Leeds, UK, led the development of a faculty-wide Personal Reflective Portfolio as part of a university project--A Strategic Model for Developing Methods and Materials for Recording Achievement in Traditional Universities (Jackson et al., 2000). This paper describes the materials and their usage, the value of bottom-up design, and the issues of embedding this type of material within faculty programmes. The reflections of both students and tutors are considered. Overall the materials are viewed positively and considered to have long-term and workplace relevance. Whether they meet the original aim of helping students to become more reflective and evaluative learners is impossible to measure and not thought to be successful as yet. Reflection on action is more evident than action planning.     

Preparing Geography,Earth and Environmental Science (GEES) Students for Employment in the Enterprise Culture

Maps and related graphics are important means of representing key issues in development education and related themes. This paper examines the use of world maps in materials used in teaching development in higher education and concludes that many are not 'fit for purpose'. Many of these maps create false connotations, which can lead to misleading understandings of key issues.     

Dancing to Different Tunes: Conveying Latin American realities to composite classes

Students are often attracted to courses about Latin America by media images of the region with their aura of danger and unpredictability. Such stereotypes must be addressed in teaching, but the means is far from clear when the participants stem from different disciplinary backgrounds and academic traditions. The method adopted here was to tackle development through discourse construction through an appreciation of positionality. This approach enabled students to draw on their respective backgrounds and experience critically; it also ensured that students appreciated the core concepts embedded in the discipline, while engaging in a challenging way with the issues raised by Latin American development.     

Arena symposium: equal opportunities

The Internet is a hospitable medium for distance learning. Some geography educators fear that distance education confronts the discipline with a moral dilemma, however. One, in particular, acknowledges some of the advantages of distance learning, but contends that it cannot convey the sense of place that is 'the essence of what it means to be a geographer'. This paper is concerned with the morality of distance learning. In particular, it considers educators' obligations to deliver quality education, and to make it as widely accessible as possible. The paper stresses that the key distinction between distance learning and traditional resident instruction is not the mode of delivery, nor is it the distances in time and space that separate students and teachers. Rather, it is that distance learners are a qualitatively different, older population, with different educational needs from traditional on-campus undergraduates and graduate students. The paper argues that geography educators have a moral obligation to serve lifelong learners, an obligation that should take precedence over our allegiance to conventional notions about what constitutes the essence of our field.     

Linking Research and Teaching: A staff‐student interview project

This paper describes a project used in the first-year curriculum that requires students to interview a member of staff about their research as a possible model to link research and teaching in the university. Through a critical evaluation, which draws upon responses canvassed from students and staff, the value of the project is assessed and its scope for application within other institutions suggested.     

Geography in Higher Education in Australia

Within the last 30 years, geographical information systems (GIS) have been used increasingly in the training of geographers. On the basis of the philosophy of technology and instrumental genesis, we sketch how the use of instruments interacts with learning processes and outline how this can be studied. We empirically analyse students' learning processes and the influences of teaching practice in an introductory course in GIS. We show that students have different strategies for creating their personal instrument for spatial thinking and how teaching interacts with the students' learning processes. Finally, we discuss how GIS may gradually alter future professional development of geographers.     

Connecting high school and university teachers in national and international contexts: perspectives from the 2012 Bangalore workshop of the AAG-CGGE

This paper focuses on the Center for Global Geography Education teaching workshop held in Bangalore, India, in March 2012 which served as a collaborative forum linking geography teachers in secondary and higher education in the USA and India. It considers the inclusion of the Advanced Placement Human Geography teachers from the USA and the building of global teaching content in collaborative teams as a useful way to connect geography teachers across institutional contexts. Based on a survey of workshop participants, it also highlights some of the issues that need to be addressed for further strengthening of high school–university linkages within national and across international contexts.     

Searching for good practice in postgraduate education

Regional geography courses have declined in status and number at many North American universities. Yet it is regional courses which students with limited geographical education at the high school level may identify as typical geography, and thus regional courses may play a significant role in recruitment of geography majors. Regional courses on the students' country or state/province offer an excellent opportunity to showcase how geographic perspectives can enrich our understanding of the familiar, both in terms of place and discipline. This paper discusses the pivotal role a regional geography course has been given in a new university's geography curriculum, and the innovative structuring of the course so as to avoid some of the deficiencies of common instructional patterns which may deter some students from pursuing further geographic education.     

A graduates and employers database system as a strategic resource for geography departments

Abstract

With greater competition in the mass higher education market in the UK, each institution will have to stimulate and promote greater interaction between itself and the world outside if it is to compete successfully. Presently, such interaction occurs for a variety of reasons, at many different levels and over different time scales. This paper proposes an approach to fostering greater interaction at departmental level through a network of former graduates in geography and their employers. It describes the concept of a graduates and employers database system (GEDS) and outlines how such a system should become a key resource for strategic management and planning in geography departments.     

Geography's difficult engagement with the psychological therapies

The consideration of psychoanalytic issues presents geography and geographers with a number of difficulties; this paper examines those difficulties from within a humanistic perspective. The most common geographical engagements with the psychological therapies have been with their psychodynamic and, to a lesser extent, humanist methodological forms. A humanist perspective on this engagement suggests that it has led to two associated problems. At a disciplinary level it has resulted in an approach that has tended to privilege intellectual knowledge at the expense of emotion, and at a personal level it has not encouraged an approach that is sensitive to difference. This essay proposes that a commitment to an engaged, 'congruent' listening might help temper these difficulties.