Geography Field Course Research Articles

Geospatial technologies in hazard research and response – a case study of Paper2GIS in an international field course

ABSTRACT Geospatial technologies have revolutionised the field of hazard research as well as geography field-courses, providing powerful tools to analyse and visualise geospatial data for decision-making purposes. This paper presents a case study of Paper2GIS, an application for field data collection tested during an international field course in Seyðisfjörður, East Iceland. The field course was designed to expose students to the practical application of interdisciplinary geospatial technologies in hazard research. Students experienced geological/physical geography field mapping as well as data collection using Paper2GIS. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of Paper2GIS in facilitating hazard research with a participatory component, as well as the simplification of data collection during geography field courses. Paper2GIS proved to be an effective tool for enhancing collaboration, data visualisation, and decision-making. The findings provide valuable insights for researchers, practitioners, and educators looking to incorporate low-tech geospatial technologies into their work.

Disruption, Discovery, and Field Courses: A Case Study of Student Engagement during a Global Pandemic

This article examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the teaching of a geography field course. What was discovered from the teaching of a geography field course using a remote learning structure? To answer this, we reflect on the adaptation of an Urban Sustainability field course taught during the COVID-19 pandemic. Framed by the pedagogical context for engaging in field courses, we define what experiential learning looks like within a remote learning structure. This new approach to teaching challenged our assumptions about how students engage with the world. In this article we share lessons learned about the adaptability of experiential learning opportunities. We conclude with a discussion of the global pandemic as a difficult yet opportune time to disrupt and experiment with new forms of teaching. Although the pandemic restricted human interaction, we reveal different types of connections and ways to engage with the field. Through a discussion of the impact of the global pandemic on the signature feature of geographers’ work—fieldwork—this article contributes to the evolving roles of the professional geographer in the twenty-first century.

A Place for Serendipitous Mistakes? Selling Mixed Methods Fieldwork to Students in a Digital Age

abstractI draw on over a decade of experience teaching two required mixed methods geography field courses at my university. I reflect on teaching field-based courses in a digital age when a large proportion of our students have no intention of either using mixed methods or even doing fieldwork. Yet, my department passionately defends the fieldwork tradition in geography, and continues to require these classes much to the dismay of our students. This paper explores why we continue to require such field classes, especially when students increasingly do not want them. Furthermore, I discuss why we should promote mixed methods when deeply entrenched qualitative vs. quantitative research camps persist and remain in our field. I also explore “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” of teaching mixed methods and taking students to the field, all while arguing that doing fieldwork is a place to find one’s “Zen.”

Instagram photography and the geography field course: snapshots from Berlin

ABSTRACT Although geography has long associated itself with photography, the rapid advancement of technology has created a clear divide between the visual practices regularly used in wider society and the way photography is utilized by critical geographers in their teaching. We suggest the door is ajar for new modes of (geo)photographic thinking, and one visual tool at our disposal is social media applications that allow images to be instantly shared, analysed, and discussed. This article critically reflects on the use of Instagram to enhance student participation, engagement, and learning on a geography field course in Berlin. Based on interviews with students, their field journals, and our own critical reflections, this paper looks at some advantages of using Instagram in teaching geography, but also promotes caution and presents drawbacks to relying on instant visual digital methods.

Exploring cultural geography field course using story maps

ABSTRACTThis article explores the use of Story Maps in a cultural geography field course that uses a place-based approach to understand the Delta Blue’s culture. In this study, Story Maps was used to capture and map student experiences as they engaged in a field study. Student experiences are captured by incorporating different data mediums such as narratives, personal reflections, digital photos, videos and website. Such a project has the potential to challenge students to work collectively and present a coherent story of their field experiences. This, in turn, can be used to improve the design and experience of a field course. The study demonstrates that the availability of simple web-based mapping platform such as Story maps provides students the ability to harness technology to create geocoded narratives, visual representations and spatial documentation to map their field course experience.

International geography field courses: practices and challenges

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.

Mobile Learning in a Human Geography Field Course

This article reports on reusable mobile digital learning resources designed to assist human geography undergraduate students in exploring the geographies of life in Dublin. Developing active learning that goes beyond data collection to encourage observation and thinking in the field is important. Achieving this in the context of large class sizes presents several challenges. Combining in situ learning with spatially accurate historical and contemporary multimedia, a set of location-aware digital mobile tools, or mediascapes, was developed. How scaffolding can be achieved in such a context, focusing on the development of students’ observational, enquiry, and thinking skills in the field was explored.

Negotiating the responsibilities of collaborative undergraduate fieldcourses

Undergraduate fieldcourses to destinations in the global South have received much critical scholarly and pedagogic attention. This article reflects on a third‐year Geography fieldcourse toKenya, which aimed to collaborate with local partners in providing an immersive and co‐constitutive learning environment that transcended the politics of knowledge production defining the global South as a distanciated object of study. We shape our reflections on this fieldcourse through a conceptualisation of responsibility as a relational, inter‐subjective achievement borne out of negotiation and encounter. Focusing in particular on the trade‐offs that are required when taking into account different staff, students and partner organisations' positionalities, expectations and experiences, we argue that scholarship concerning the responsibilities of geographers' engagements with the global South needs to account for the emotional, embodied and affective challenges inherent in practising collaborative academic endeavour.

Building collaborative research opportunities into study abroad programs: a case study from Panama

As universities increase their international study opportunities, enormous potential exists to create geography field courses that provide undergraduates and graduate students with primary research experience and intercultural collaboration. This paper draws from our experience leading a two-week collaborative field course in Panama. We outline our principles of engagement: focus on problem-oriented research; build upon local research; create a reflexive working relationship between host and home scholars; foster student collaboration in multiple study stages, including data collection, analysis and interpretation; and make results available, especially to community stakeholders. We conclude that research-driven, collaborative approaches can result in meaningful learning outcomes.

Video Documentaries in the Assessment of Human Geography Field Courses

This paper critically reviews the use of video documentaries in the assessment of human geography field courses. It aims to contribute to recent debates about the role of visual methods for developing active and deep learning in student-centred teaching. Based on four days of group work in Crete, 30 third-year students produced individual 10-minute video documentaries on ‘Mediterranean Rural Spaces’. Analysing students' experiences of video production highlights the need for innovative teaching and assessment methods and the importance of creating independent and creative students equipped with a broad set of skills for an increasingly flexible job market.

Aligned assessment of technology-mediated field learning

AbstractMobile technology-mediated learning is increasingly being adopted in geographical contexts, but considerably less thought has been applied as to how assessment protocols might be adjusted so that the overall learning experience remains appropriately aligned. In this case study, in which a suite of locationally situated mediascapes were constructed and used as part of a 2nd year Human Geography field course to Dublin, we explore our success or otherwise in designing an assessment regime that captures the field experience as a whole. Evaluation, conducted via a focus group, identified that the use of a combined mediascape-essay approach as a major component of the assessment successfully captured the main elements of the learning and teaching experience and facilitated deeper learning.

Learner-Centered Teaching and Assessment in an Undergraduate Field Analysis Course

Undergraduate geography field courses are relatively rare at American univers-ities, though they can exemplify well the fundamental tenets of learner-centered education. This article reports on an intensive three-week field analysis course taught at Northern Arizona University at Flagstaff, within the Department of Geography, Planning, and Recreation. Co-taught by the authors since 1999, Field Analysis (GGR 480) serves as the department's capstone course in geography, required of all undergraduate majors. Nine years of experiences, lessons learned, teaching and assessment strategies, assigned projects, and course development are described herein. Educators with little field experience are encouraged to develop their own field-based course in geography that applies learner-centered education and assessment techniques.

Inverse Distance Learning: Digitally Enhancing a Geography Field-Course

This paper explores the use of technological tools often utilized for traditional distance learning course delivery to provide a means of allowing virtual participation in a month-long geography field-course. Students participated in documenting the daily activities through digital photography and construction of a regularly updated course web page. Although the effort to create and maintain the inverse distance learning component of the course was substantial, many benefits were realized that enhanced the field-based and experiential objectives of the course such as enrichment of the experiential component for both real and virtual course participants, collaborative decision-making, and the acquisition of technological skills necessary for the rapidly changing field of geography.

‘I Can't Eat That, It's Purple’: a Geography Field Course in Vanuatu and Fiji

AbstractA month‐long field course in the Pacific island states of Vanuatu and Fiji focused on development issues, involving lectures, seminars and much informal interaction. Students completed daily journals as a means of learning, a form of self‐assessment of learning, a way of evaluating their participation in the course and their perception of its value. Journal themes reflected an evolution from unsettling rhetorical questions towards notions of discovery, autonomy, reflexivity and emerging cultural sensitivity. Students developed valuable social skills, and gained first‐hand experience of various concepts of development and social justice. Grading the journals was difficult because of the extent of subjectivity and diverse personal experiences. The course, and the journals, emphasised the diverse values and roles of courses both on, and particularly in, developing countries, despite the substantial costs.

Using a Web-based Resource to Prepare Students for Fieldwork: Evaluating the Dark Peak Virtual Tour

This paper reports on development of a Dark Peak website and its use to prepare first-year geography students for a one-day physical geography field course in the south Pennines. The Virtual Tour (VT) component of the website is the main focus of this paper. Pre- and post-fieldwork evaluations of the first version of the VT by 195 students are presented with the revisions undertaken as a result of this feedback. Recommendations for the design and implementation of virtual fieldwork websites are made. The current version is available at http://www.art.man.ac.uk/Geog/fieldwork/

The geographical field course as active archive

This paper narrates a collaborative effort to re-place a local culture of ‘the field’. By oscillating between two geography field courses in Glenmore, Scotland - one in 1951, the other in 2002 - it traces a route through different residues of fieldwork: material objects (photographs, log-books, diaries, equipment), mnemonic devices (biography, oral narrative, re-enactment, technology) and physical phenomena (footpaths, landscape features, field sites). Framed as an ongoing and mobile event, overlapping versions of the field course(s) are then recounted through embodied methodological strategies, or ‘taskscapes’. These close observations of the processes of field practice focus on walking, sensing, talking and archiving. They resist easy interpretation, and do not always register a resolved narrative. What is more pertinent, I argue, is to understand them as an unfinished and active archive that speaks of the localized, everyday conditions in which geography’s history is made.

'An Unbelievable Academic and Personal Experience': Issues around teaching undergraduate field courses in Africa

This paper explores the teaching of geography field courses in Africa for UK university undergraduates. Using largely qualitative feedback, the experiences of students, staff and local communities involved in field courses to Kenya, Zimbabwe and The Gambia are evaluated. Benefits and disbenefits of these field courses to the participating students, the local community and teaching staff are scrutinised. The paper concludes that such field courses to 'exotic' destinations are an effective means to student recruitment and certainly achieve their aims while providing meaningful teaching and learning experiences. Furthermore, the analysis shows that field courses to 'poor' destinations in sub-Saharan Africa can avoid dangers of 'development tourism' if conducted with ethical sensitivity.

Teaching the holocaust through landscape study: The Liverpool experience

There are a number of ways in which the Holocaust can be taught at various educational levels. This article explains the experiences of one university geography field course, which seeks to use ‘conventional’ landscape study approaches to provide an understanding of aspects of the Holocaust. It describes the methodology of the course, the experiences of students and staff, and details the difficulties of such study. In particular, it emphasizes the need for sensitive staff‐student relations and the wider educational impact of such work. Whilst stressing the uniqueness of such a course in a geography degree, it commends the strategy to teachers in many other disciplines.

Partnership with Schools: a case study of a geography field course

summary British teacher education institutions are being encouraged by the Department of Education and Science to develop a partnership with schools by involving teachers in the design of courses and in selecting, teaching, supervising and assessing students. However, as partnership is a two‐way process, there should be reciprocal action with tutors helping teachers in school activities. This case study describes a programme of work devised for a geography field course in which a group of PGCE students teach 120 third form pupils from a local comprehensive school. The evaluation provides evidence that the exercise, apart from being an enjoyable and stimulating experience, fulfils DES expectations of the value of genuine partnership to all concerned—tutor and students, teachers and pupils. The author is indebted to the geography staff at Ulverston Victoria High School for their help in organising this course.