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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.
| 1 | Student-centred learning The teaching methods advocated in the following pages challenge students to take responsibility for their own learning and, in so doing, alter radically the role of the teacher from authority figure, through interpreter and demonstrator, to adviser and colleague. Such 'student-centred learning' has many dimensions, which are themselves varyingly emphasized by different teaching methods. Nevertheless, the four key dimensions with which we are concerned are as follows: control over the aims, objectives, content, method, level, pace, assessment and evaluation of the work; workload, in the balance of work between teacher and student; activity, from passive (listening to a lecture) to active (doing things); learning autonomously rather than being taught. |
| 2 | Active learning Reinforcing this last point, we believe that successful teaching is that which facilitates active learning. Students contribute to, or participate in, the learning process in three main ways: as passive receivers of knowledge, as explorers of existing knowledge or as creators of their own knowledge. As one moves from the first type of response to the second and third, the student's role changes from passive to active learning. The progression involved here might be illustrated by the differences between students silently listening to a lecture, through the type of work involved in undertaking projects as part of a research-based field course, to the creation and production of an undergraduate dissertation. In short, we see a move from receiving structures of existing knowledge through to the student's involvement in creating new ones. |
| 3 | Learning as an open-ended process Active learning motivates student and teacher alike to reflect critically on knowledge and to seek actively to find out more. Each becomes more of a geographer, rather than merely learning or teaching geography. This, we argue, contributes to the personal development and growth of both parties since education is an open-ended process in which knowledge is a product of its own learning. By being geographers, we do not merely find out more and more geography but extend and transform what geography is. In other words, those who study geography as an academic discipline are, at the same time, inescapably involved in the development of geographies of the world in which they live. |
Much can be gained, however, from viewing teaching and learning in a social context. First, geographical knowledge is itself rooted in that context. Sensitive teaching can help students to make connections between geographical knowledge and problems of social significance. Second, teaching takes place in a social context. To be effective, it should not be a one-way transmission of information, but rather a process which encourages the free flow of communication between all parties involved. Good teaching benefits from recognizing barriers to communication that sometimes exist in the classroom and in opening up dialogue between teacher and learner. Finally, effective learning can often take place in a social context. As will be seen at various points in this book, it can be profitable to break down the isolated nature of learning by creating conditions in which students are required to act collaboratively and are assessed jointly.
This text contains eleven chapters, which initially examine specific teaching methods before turning to consider broader issues. Following this introduction, chapters 2, 3 and 4 deal in turn with the traditional staples of the geography programme-the lecture, fieldwork and practical and project work. In each case, we consider the conventional use of these teaching methods before suggesting alternative ways that they might be employed. Chapter 5 tackles teaching geography through discussion, particularly through students working in groups. Some elements in this chapter (seminars and personal tutorials) may also be familiar; others (simulations and various forms of group tutorial) may be less so. The next two chapters (chapters 6 and 7) examine and try to codify principles of good practice in two areas which are generating considerable interest the in the changing world of higher education, namely resource-based learning and computer-assisted teaching and learning.
At this stage, we turn to examine wider issues. Chapter 8 explores issues involved in assessing students, with chapter 9 examining how courses can be evaluated and improved. In many ways, the concerns of all these chapters come together in the penultimate chapter (chapter 10), which explores principles for designing the geography curriculum. In designing a curriculum, one reflects on a host of questions besides the specific content of individual courses - questions which might well include the following.
The final chapter (chapter 11) rounds off the discussion by sketching out ten guiding principles that underpin much of our discussion and adds some final thoughts on the nature of good teaching. However, in a sense, it is questions like the ones posed above that are the real outcome. We do not supply systematic, let alone definitive, answers to any of these questions, but at least seek to present the issues squarely for debate. We would all be truly delighted if the practical suggestions that we make for tackling these questions are quickly superseded by other geographers addressing themselves to the same problems.
There are many general books on teaching in higher education. We particularly recommend the frequently revised and reprinted American text Teaching Tips (McKeachie, 1986) and its most recent British counterpart (Brown and Atkins, 1988). The relationship between teaching and learning is one of the most significant and difficult areas of educational research. Studies that start from a view of how students learn and then outline ways to teach effectively include Rogers (1969), Entwistle and Hounsell (1975), Knowles and Associates (1984), Boud (1985, 1988) and Gibbs (1988). The question of the competing demands on the geographer's time and the pressures imposed by the external environment are addressed at various stages in Martin Kenzer's stimulating collection of essays entitled On Becoming a Professional Geographer (Kenzer, 1989).
Pages created 20 May 1999