Engaging students and maintaining quality in the era of massification: strategies and approaches for teaching large first-year courses

This article examines the nature of first-year international relations (IR) teaching in Australia. Cost pressures in the university sector have been met by economies of scale with foundational classes becoming very large, often with hundreds of students. The article critically reflects on current strategies for teaching these courses to meet the challenge of providing an engaging and high quality learning environment in large classes with widely fluctuating student entry scores, university preparedness, and educational capital and language competence. The article argues that a successful approach to improving the quality of first-year IR teaching and to accommodating the diverse learning needs of all students is to run these courses in multiple streams, with one dedicated to providing a richer, more active IR learning experience. In the era of ‘massification’, allowing students a level of guided autonomy in aligning their learning preferences with teaching methods is likely to increase engagement and motivation, thereby improving retention and degree progression.     

Co-Producing Mobilities: negotiating geographical knowledge in a conference session on the move

In an experimental session entitled Co-Producing Mobilities held at the 2014 Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers Annual Conference, 20 mobility scholars travelled around London on foot, by bus and by Tube to investigate how mobilities could be considered co-produced. In this paper, 18 participants reflect on this collaborative experiment and on how it influenced their thinking about mobilities, geographical knowledge and pedagogy. Contributions cast light on the function of conferences and the multiple forms of pedagogy they enable, and provide guiding resources for those now wanting to continue such experiments.     

Participative critical enquiry in graduate field-based learning

This paper outlines a critical pedagogic approach to field-based learning (FBL) at graduate level. Drawing on student experience stemming from a FBL module and as part of an MA programme in Environment, Society and Development, the paper addresses the complexities associated with student-led, participative critical enquiry during fieldwork in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. The paper examines emerging student discourses through a group assessment and a series of individual reflective journals. Both are contextualised in relation to FBL module learning outcomes. Finally, aspects of fieldwork influencing the feasibility and effectiveness of participative critical enquiry as a field-based pedagogic endeavour are considered.     

Revitalizing Economic Geography through Teaching Excellence: Some Pedagogic Reflections

In this position paper, the authors outline some of the pressing trends in the recent development of economic geography as a sub-discipline in human geography. In particular, they note the lack of critical discussion of important pedagogical issues in teaching what might be termed ‘new economic geographies’, and particularly those associated with the ‘cultural turn’. In doing so, the most challenging politics and practices of teaching economic geography are introduced. Drawing on the various contributions to this symposium, five areas for pedagogical developments and cross-fertilization are outlined.     

Practitioner Perspectives on the use of Technology in Fieldwork Teaching

During the last decade, technological developments in computer hardware, software and networks, combined with increasing pressures on staff and students, have led to a proliferation of Communication and Information Technology (C&IT) within the Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences (GEES) disciplines. This research investigates the role of C&IT within field courses, which in this paper are conceived of as a specific approach to teaching in the GEES disciplines. Through a national survey of field courses, the general level of usage of C&IT in the field was established. This was supplemented by an expert group analysis, which focused on the reasons behind the use of C&IT in the field. It was concluded that most use of C&IT in the field is driven by technological rather than pedagogic innovation.     

The challenges of ‘teaching by being’: the case of participatory resource management

In 1997 a new unit, Participatory Resource Management, was developed and offered in the School of Resource, Environment and Society, at the Australian National University. The challenges of the unit were multiple, ranging from introducing social science material into a science curriculum, to attempting to change practitioners' attitudes towards natural resource management. This paper is an account of this experience showing how feminist pedagogy has provided a useful framework to foster attitudinal change and encourage a paradigm shift. The paper presents the unit aims and objectives. It gives insights into the specific processes implemented and reflects on the challenges posed by the unit and the personal challenges to ‘teaching by being’.     

Student–staff partnerships in learning and teaching: an overview of current practice and discourse

ABSTRACT

Student–staff partnerships in learning and teaching are not a new idea but have seen a growing interest and momentum in recent years. In this article, I provide an overview of the background and context of increased student–staff partnerships, a definition of partnership and some of the benefits. I highlight several examples of practice from different countries, universities and disciplines, and involving different numbers of students, which help to illustrate some of the variety of what is possible in student–staff partnerships in learning and teaching but also some of the challenges. I will focus on key ideas currently being debated in student–staff partnership work in the form of theoretical framing; contested definitions; mixed motivations and concerns about partnership being co-opted by neoliberalism; the imperative of inclusion; and the role of student–staff relationships. I conclude by considering what ways geographers might contribute to future research and practice, by offering some practical strategies for establishing and maintaining good quality partnerships in learning and teaching and with suggestions for enhancing the community and culture within which we operate.     

Practical and Auspicious: Thai Handbook Knowledge for Agriculture and the Environment

This article is the first thorough examination of the Thai handbooks that are produced to explain agricultural and environmental knowledge. These khu-meu (handbooks) and tamra (textbooks) come into use when knowledge is moving from one party to another. They also establish symbolic correlations within the human, terrestrial world, or between the human, terrestrial world and the worlds of the gods, spirits, ancestors, or the unseen. Despite the fact that handbooks are pervasive for the organising, preserving, retrieving, transmitting and consuming of knowledge throughout the Southeast Asian region, there has been very little concerted study of handbook knowledge. Our analysis of environmental handbooks in Thailand shows that simplified mastery is a common goal of the handbook genre in both its “how to” and “reading signs” forms. The knowledge captured by the Thai language handbooks is of a practical, predictive kind and suited to particular circumstances. Such knowledge can ultimately bridge and blur the dichotomy between scientific and local epistemologies.     

Teaching Global and Social Justice as Transgressive Spaces of Possibility

Abstract: In this article I reflect on introducing critical pedagogy into social justice teaching in an elite UK university as part of the Nottingham Critical Pedagogy Project. I de‐essentialise Freire's conceptualisation of the human subject and her desire for transcendence with the introduction of Deleuze and Guattari's politics of desire. This enables an adaption of critical pedagogy from its original context of popular politics to the individualised elite setting of our project. Our pedagogical objectives become the opening of spaces of possibility which decentre the dominant regime of truth of the neoliberal university and enable imagining and becoming “other”. This involves disrupting normal patterns of classroom performativity in terms of student as consumer and lecturer as producer of commodities, transgressing dualisms between mind/body, intellectual/emotional and teacher/student. Our pedagogical praxis is therefore inherently political as by radically disturbing commodified subjectivities we foster processes that lead to unanticipated, maybe even unspeakable, transgressions.