Teaching Innovation
Prof. Eric Pawson with GEOG 106 students, Birdlings Flat, Canterbury
Geography as a subject and a department has long been known for its innovative teaching - in the field, around campus, in labs, for individual students and groups - as well as the more traditional lecture-based approach. Even that is changing however, with many lecturers using more active forms of participation in lectures to make learning more memorable and fun.
The department has a number of teaching award winners, including the Head of Department, Associate Professor Wendy Lawson, Dr Deirdre Hart, Associate Professor Simon Kingham, Dr David Conradson (from his previous university, Southampton), and Professor Eric Pawson. Eric also received a national teaching award in 2009 and co-chairs an international group of geographers in higher education promoting active learning, the International Network of Learning and Teaching.
‘Active learning’ is a term used to describe methods that focus on the learner rather than the teacher, and encourage active engagement rather than passive spectating. Field-based learning is an good example of this, and is incorporated in many Geography courses, and almost all in physical geography. Active field learning is experiential: with students encouraged to work for themselves, or even to work out what the issue is and how to go about undertaking the research in the field to resolve it.
This is a good description of problem-based learning, or PBL, which is the core of the department’s capstone course, GEOG 309: Research Methods in Geography. In PBL, students work in groups, and focus on a research problem over the entire length of the course. The idea is to give everyone responsibility for their own learning, and to learn by experience, and by mistakes, just as in the workplace. PBL is used in some other courses in the department as well, but GEOG 309 adds an extra twist: it is a service learning course where the problems are set in conjunction with grassroots community groups (such as Project Lyttelton) and part of the final output is a community report back.
Problem-based and service learning are common overseas but Canterbury is unusual in its commitment to them in New Zealand. It reflects the care that UC geographers take to introduce a whole range of active learning methods in the classroom, during lab and seminar discussions and in a range of fieldwork situations. For students of geography, this opens up a range of new and exciting possibilities for making sense of our changing world.