Preface

For a book written jointly by seven individuals, this volume has a comparatively straightforward history. The authors have long worked together as part of the editorial group that produces the Journal of Geography in Higher Education (JGHE), a publication founded in 1976 on the belief that teaching has been consistently undervalued in geographical higher education. Several years ago, a good friend in academic publishing suggested that what we were saying in the JGHE was important and merited a book that would present its ideas to the wider geographical audience.

The result is the book that you see before you. It 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.

In the process of writing, we have been assisted by a large number of good-natured and long-suffering friends. These include Lee Andresen, Alan Backler, Jacquelyn Beyer, Tim Burt, John Cowan, John Fien, Dee Fink, Colin Flood Page, Pip Forer, Vincent Gardiner, Rod Gerber, Graham Gibbs, Margaret Gold, Peter Gould, Norman Graves, Martin Haigh, Graham Humphrys, Nick Isbister, David Jaques, Alan Jones, Sally Marston, Joe Powell, Derek Rowntree, Iain Stephenson, Paul Tranter, David Walker and Tom Wilkinson. As ever, we bear the sole responsibility for our own follies. Above all, we thank our colleagues on the editorial board of the JGHE, past and present, who have all contributed to making this book a reality.

Finally, we would also like to record our formal gratitude for permission to reproduce copyright material here to the Johnson Foundation of Racine, Wisconsin, Martin Secker and Warburg, the National Council for Educational Technology and the editorial board of the JGHE.

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