Teaching and learning global urban geography: an international learning-centred approach

The recent drive for the internationalization of curricula, together with calls for the internationalization of the sub-discipline of urban geography beyond the “west”, and the growing shift towards learning-centred paradigms in higher education, provided impetus for the design and delivery of an upper level undergraduate urban geography module – “Global Urbanism” – that is reported here. Using this module as a case study, the paper demonstrates the ways in which student learning and engagement with internationalized global urban geography can be facilitated by a learning-centred approach that is enhanced through the design of, and engagement with, assessment items, particularly research-led learning journals.     

Heaney and education

Seamus Heaney inhabited the world of teacher education, as a student, and later as a lecturer, in 1960s Belfast. That world was infused by three ideas: learning as a journey, learning through play, and learning as construction. This article traces correspondences between these and thematic trends in Heaney’s work. It presents the case that Heaney’s writing reflects an informed understanding of children and of learning peculiar to the mind of a great teacher. Moreover, Heaney’s contribution to education is remarkable in that it transcends the school and the academy, and offers a creative vision in which poetry and learning are inextricably linked. As Heaney put it in Among Schoolchildren, the “walls of the world expand” as reader and writer, teacher and learner, poet and child “go beyond our normal cognitive bounds and sense a new element where we are not alien but liberated, more alive to ourselves, more drawn out, more educated”.     

What Sort of Geographical Education for the Anthropocene?

As the Anthropocene concept gains in prominence, there is opportunity to explore it as a social and cultural process, not merely as a matter of scientific definition and debate. This paper seeks to sketch some of the social dimensions of the Anthropocene, in terms of anxiety about the human future, about risk, and about environmental limits. It considers how the term encapsulates a prophetic sense of concern and unease about people's place in nature, the very thing that the embrace of industrial capitalism was supposed to remove. It then explores four open‐ended attributes of a geographical education for the Anthropocene. These are: first, engaging critically with digital technologies; second, countering grand narratives with local encounters; third, setting hope alongside gloom; and fourth, remembering the past as well as the future. The purpose of such attributes is to prepare students for creative encounters with the uncertainties of the Anthropocene. The implications for educational practice are then considered, including the role of active and community‐based learning strategies within a university conceived of as a place of classrooms without borders.     

International geography field courses: practices and challenges

Abstract

This paper introduces a special issue of the Journal of Geography in Higher Education on the practices and challenges associated with taking undergraduate geography students abroad on field courses. I argue that geography is positioned to benefit from both the internationalization of higher education and the demand by students for global experiences. The papers in this special issue focus on three aspects of international field courses: curriculum design and international partnerships, student engagement during short-duration field courses, and how encounters with place can be aided through reflection and play. I conclude with suggestions for future research on international field courses.     

Anthropological Contributions and Challenges to the Study of Children and Childhoods

This essay considers the anthropology of childhood's recent growth. It summarizes the sub-field's extensive if often unacknowledged past, reviews its late 20th-century bourgeoning, and then highlights three influential teaching texts, each of which argues for a more considered, culturally informed understanding of children and childhood while performing the vital service of bringing together heretofore scattered ideas and data. To ensure the field's further maturation, scholars must leverage what an integrative, four-fields approach has to offer, attend to the conjoined, coterminous, and coeval facets of adulthood and childhood; leverage what an integrative, four-fields approach has to offer; expand the pediatric lens; and otherwise guard against our own cultural biases.     

基于流形学习与光谱解混的文物表面字迹增强——以云冈第38窟为例

文物表面的文字是了解历史的关键信息，对文物表面文字信息的探索成为文物保护的重要环节。结合流形学习与光谱解混，提出一种新的文物表面字迹增强方法。首先，利用基于流形学习的等距映射方法对预处理后的高光谱图像进行非线性降维，得到信息量最大的灰度图像；其次，分析文字与背景的光谱特征，通过多层非负矩阵分解方法得到字迹丰度图；然后，将二者进行加权平均得到字迹增强图像，再与合成真彩色影像进行HSV融合，得到字迹融合影像；最后，为更好地辨认文字，在字迹增强图像上裁剪文字并做形态学变换，得到字迹提取图。以云冈石窟第38窟的一景褪色文字高光谱图像为例进行了验证，结果表明，该方法能够有效地增强出文物表面的褪色文字，且较其他增强方法效果更好。     

Insights Regarding Transdisciplinarity and Knowledge Transfer Gained from Two Case Studies on Integrated Water Resources Management in Ukraine and Mongolia

Abstract

Transdisciplinary environmental research (TD research) seeks to solve problems arising at the point of interaction between ecological systems, the economy, and society. It seeks to enhance problem-solving capacity through interdisciplinarity and knowledge transfer between scientific and non-scientific actors. The article assesses how far the prerequisites for knowledge transfer are met in transdisciplinary projects on integrated water resources management (IWRM), particularly in post-socialist transition countries. It examines two relevant case studies, in Ukraine and Mongolia, which share a similar institutional and cultural background, and use some of the same methods closely related to knowledge transfer. It is shown that, in each case, knowledge transfer was achieved more or less effectively in both directions — from science to society and vice versa, despite the additional obstacles posed by a common post-socialist legacy. The paper concludes with a number of recommendations for designing and implementing similar TD research projects in the field of IWRM.     

Attending to grape vines: perceptual practices,planty agencies and multiple temporalities in Australian viticulture

This article considers the agency of crop plants within sociocultural processes by examining how grape vines influence seasonal labour patterns in Australian viticulture and wine production. Drawing on ethnographic research within a large Australian wine company, I examine how vineyard managers and winemakers coordinate the timing of the grape harvest with the ripening of grapes. I argue that by making the harvest's approach perceptible to humans, chemical and sensory tests of grape ripeness precipitate seasonal changes in viticultural work—rendering grape vines active participants in patterning social time. Practices of attention to ripening grapes thus render the social agency of grape vines perceptible. I analyse these time-reckoning practices as a ‘learning to be affected’, in which human viticulturists actively strive through multiple sensory practices to become attuned to plants' activities. However, attending to the multiple practices used to reckon the ‘right’ time to harvest grapes also emphasises that these ways of enacting the times and agencies of crop plants may interfere or conflict with one another. Highlighting the emotional stresses and tensions between viticultural workers that this may generate, I suggest that agricultural time is both more conflicted and more suffused with power relations than theoretical accounts have typically indicated.     

影响语言学习策略使用因素分析

在二语习得领域,影响语言学习策略使用的因素分析是近几年来语言学家的兴趣所在。通过阅读大量二语习得领域的资料,作者发现性别、职业、语言学习观、语言水平和学习者动机是对语言学习策略使用影响最为显著的因素。     

技术学习与创新:经济地理学的视角

技术学习与创新是20世纪90年代以来经济地理学研究的核心领域之一,它与"异端经济学"之间的互动,既促进了经济地理学的繁荣和学科地位的提升,也为"异端经济学"对技术学习与创新的研究提供了独特的地理视角。本文试图全面梳理经济地理学技术学习与创新研究兴起与深化的过程,从地理接近与面对面交流,关系接近与实践社区,制度接近、嵌入、路径依赖与创新场三个既相互争论又高度互补的方面,来系统阐述技术学习与创新的经济地理机制,并针对当前研究的局限性提出了建构高层次综合的技术学习创新与区域发展理论的设想。