Teaching Geography in Higher Education

2009-07-09T11:31:00.000-07:00

Teaching Geography in Higher Education A Manual of Good Practice is written by John R. Gold, Alan Jenkins, Roger Lee, Janice Monk, Judith Riley, Ifan Shepherd and David Unwin.

Preface by Authors

This book is concerned primarily with the practicalities of teaching geography in higher education and is written for anyone with a current, or prospective, interest in such teaching. Responsibility for producing the first drafts of the various chapters was assigned to particular individuals, but the drafts were subsequently discussed at a series of seminars and rewritten-often by another author. The final outcome is a genuinely collective product of both teaching and learning.....

What this book is About (by Authors)

In the film The Magnificent Seven, the character played by Steve McQueen tells a story about a man who jumped out of a building several storeys high. As he passed each floor, the man called out 'so far, so good' to the startled onlookers. From our point of view, the story provides an apt analogy for the state of geography teaching in higher education: heading for an inevitable outcome but hoping that gravity and mass can be defied, or at least suspended, for the duration of the fall.

Geography teaching, like other areas of teaching in higher education, faces severe pressures from inadequate funding, but these are compounded by the fact that teachers in higher education are obliged to divert ever-greater amounts of their time and energy into such non-teaching activities as entrepreneurship, making grant applications and administering scarce resources. In saying this, we recognize that teaching at this level has always been a part-time occupation in the sense that, besides teaching, its practitioners are also required to undertake administration and research as part of their job specification. Our experience, however, suggests that these pressures have intensified to the point at which the priority and value placed on teaching are under attack and, in turn, the quality of education offered to students is being diminished.

The book that follows is a direct response to these new circumstances. It is based on three interlinked premises: first, that teaching is important rather than merely inescapable; second, that failure to pause and think about what we are doing actually makes the task of teaching far more difficult and; third, that improved teaching and learning makes life easier and more fun for all concerned. Above all, this book challenges all those who teach geography in higher education to think more clearly about how and why they do so.

Having said this, we stress that we make no direct connections between advocacy of good teaching and any particular standpoint on the purpose of education. Good teaching is vital whatever the objective: whether it be inculcating a critical stance toward the status quo, or providing the basis of a liberal education, or supplying the labour market with skilled workers. In addition, we have tried throughout to avoid preaching. While our own experiences as teachers in higher education have convinced us that there are better and more effective ways to teach than those traditionally used, we do not ask you, the reader, to take this on trust. Equally, while we make reference to educational theory and practice when relevant and enlightening, we have tried to avoid doing so merely to lend legitimacy to our efforts.

Overall, the book has two general objectives. First, we hope that it will help to defend teaching as an important aspect of work in higher education. We do so not only because we believe that good teaching is the key to successful higher education, but also because a response that downgrades teaching is not even a rational reaction to the challenge of constrained circumstances. Pressures of the type outlined above make it imperative that more rather than less time be invested in devising strategies that make best use of constrained time and resources. Indeed, we would argue that the intellectual demands that this task makes can be every bit as great as those involved in producing effective research.

Our second objective is to supply a guide to good practice - to good educational practice and good geographical practice. Although, as authors of this book, we share a general interest in educational theory, our starting point lay in our own practical experiences of teaching in higher education in Britain, Australia and North America. A glance at the contents page reveals a set of chapters defined by immediately recognizable teaching tasks, making it perfectly possible to dip into the book for discussion of issues about which we have to take decisions throughout the year. These issues might be concerned with a specific aspect of teaching - such as lectures, fieldwork, assessment or course evaluation - or with more general questions, such as the need to reform the curriculum, the wish to make teaching more cost- or time-effective, or even just how to revitalize an area of teaching which has become jaded. Throughout, we have tried to produce the sort of text that we would want to turn to ourselves when faced with these and kindred problems - pragmatically based but versed in appropriate educational theory. At the same time, we stress that this is avowedly a geography book, concerned first and foremost with the problems and issues involved in geography teaching, and is written to meet the needs of anyone with a current, or prospective, interest in teaching geography in higher education. In other words, the book was written not just because we believe that teaching matters, but also because we believe that teaching geography matters.

Geography, Anthropology, Folklore Books

2009-07-09T11:14:00.000-07:00

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Teaching Geography in Higher Education

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