Birmingham Bog outdoor laboratory: potentials and possibilities for embedding field-based teaching within the undergraduate classroom

Providing cost-effective, hands-on field-based experiences to large cohorts of undergraduate students provides a core challenge for effective teaching and learning. This grand challenge is tackled through the construction of an exemplar outdoor learning environment within the Environmental Change Outdoor Laboratory (ECOLAB): Birmingham Bog (BB). Adjacent to the Geography building, the facility aims to produce a seamless, interconnected learning environment (in both space and time) that brings inaccessible fieldwork activities direct to the classroom at the time and frequency appropriate to the learning objectives. With the integration of this facility within a 3rd year undergraduate module, we explore through group interviews the ways in which BB adapted and influenced students’ engagement with lecture material, and the extent to which the approach can complement or replace current field based teaching activities. The group interviews identified how BB was considered an example of “effective learning” within the context of the wider degree programme. However, if confirmed, the value placed on residential field courses cannot be met by such campus experiences. Despite this, BB represents an increasingly fertile space for deeper stimulation and innovative ways of learning; diversifying pedagogical techniques and enabling students to re-engage with lecture content.     

The importance of location and scale in rural and small town tourism product development: The case of the Canadian Fossil Discovery Centre,Manitoba, Canada

This paper begins with a review of the literature on tourism in rural economies, to establish a framework for analyzing large‐scale tourism products in rural and small town regions. The review is followed by the development of a typology of large‐scale attractions in rural and small town regions, including parks, casinos, events, heritage, and cultural products. The typology leads into the example of the Canadian Fossil Discovery Centre (CFDC) in Manitoba, Canada. Located in an agricultural region of south‐central Manitoba, the community of Morden is located 125 km from the provincial capital city, Winnipeg, which had a population of 811,900 in 2016. Morden is also located 35 km north of the border with North Dakota. Thus, while a small town in a traditionally rural region still dependent upon an agricultural economic base, Morden has been recently successful in diversifying its economy, including through manufacturing, services, hospitality, and tourism. In part, this success is due to a south‐central Manitoba location; however, it is also the result of innovative local leadership, including the prioritization of hospitality and tourism related to the CFDC. This paper describes the case study as an example of successful tourism development within an already economically and socially diversifying region.     

Flipping and still learning: experiences of a flipped classroom approach for a third-year undergraduate human geography course

The flipped classroom approach, a form of blended learning, is currently popular in education praxis. Initial reports on the flipped classroom include that it offers opportunities to increase student engagement and build meaningful learning and teaching experiences. In this article, we analyse teacher and student experiences of a trial flipped classroom application in a third year undergraduate human geography course that challenges conventional thinking and practice in resource management, including an explicit focus on the marginalization of Indigenous knowledges in that context. The flipped classroom trial included empirical research with teachers and students to gauge the strengths and weaknesses of this mode of learning. Interviews, focus groups, surveys, reflections and participant-observation activities were conducted before, during and after the course. The research shows that this particular implementation of the flipped classroom approach generated multiple experiences for teachers and students, some constructive, others less so. Overall, space, time and flexibility matters not only to the kinds of pedagogical tools we employed to tailor learning to students’ differing needs, but also to the kinds of learning spaces – online and offline, individually and in groups – in which learning happens.     

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.     

By the People,for the People. The Case of a Community Museum of Traumatic Greek Heritage

Abstract

This article will delineate the history and activities of the Museum of Political Exiles of Ai Stratis in Greece. The museum was founded in the 1980s by a group of former inmates who were banished in the North Aegean island of Ai Stratis, a site of political confinement between 1920s and 1960s. Since its inception, the museum has aspired to be a platform of communication, a place of healing that is by the people for the people. The aim here is to examine how this was achieved and what lessons have been learned from the endeavours of an organization that deals with a rather traumatic chapter of modern Greek history. Emphasis will be placed especially on what role the subjects of history have assumed in the design of the permanent exhibition and the educational and cultural activities.     

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.     

博物馆与青少年教育

教育是博物馆的职能之一。博物馆在青少年教育方面具有独特优势。我国博物馆界在青少年教育方面发挥了重大作用,但总体还处于探索阶段和不平衡状态,在以人为本、网络宣传、志愿者组织及经费投入等方面还存在诸多不足,需要从完善服务、因人施教、鼓励参与、创新陈列展览、发展网络教育、拓宽资金来源渠道等方面着力加强与完善新时期博物馆的青少年教育职能。