A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

318 ❘
Teaching in the disciplines
at the time of writing, in some universities, by an insistence on a proportion of assessment
by examination, driven by fears of student plagiarism). Assessments now take a wide
variety of forms, ranging from creative or practical work to illustrative and design
work, discursive essays and theses, social science-style surveys and interpretation of
data, performance and oral presentations conducted in groups or individually, online
assessments and so on. Such forms of assessment also transform in their various modes,
such as examinations, coursework, and formative or summative assessments. An
interesting approach to assessment, and an interesting approach to consideration of
gendered space, is illustrated in Case study 4.
No attempt will be made here to summarise this almost endless variety, since
assessment catalogues in themselves are probably not particularly useful in these subjects.
It is essential, nevertheless, for there to be a rationale for the assessment diet in any given
programme, and for practitioners and tutors to reflect upon the purpose of the
assessments set.
Case study 4: Teaching social geography
For most of my students, the level 2 module in social geography is their first taste
of the subject. The aim of the module is to explore the significance of space to
social life, and I select topics from current events debated in the media, or from
areas of students’ own experience, to engage their interest and to encourage them
to feel that they have something valid to contribute. Mindful of the fact that they
will need to start work on their dissertation at the end of the year, the module must
develop research skills, including presenting and analysing social patterns via
(carto)graphical and statistical techniques. Beyond this, I try to elicit an awareness
of alternative ways of explaining such patterns, to question the ‘taken-forgrantedness’
of popular and other accounts of issues such as minority ethnic
segregation, homelessness or crime.
This range of intended outcomes calls for a fairly imaginative mix of teaching
modes. The usual format for my two-hour classes is a loose structure of lecture
‘bites’ interspersed with different activities. These activities might involve a
practical exercise with maps or calculators. More frequently, I ask students to
reflect on some material stimulus which I have brought to class – a video- or
audio-tape, a newspaper article, or a set of questions. They jot down ideas, then
share them in a plenary session which leads into a mini-lecture.
To give an example. Due to the limited opportunities to develop the topic in level
1, most students are barely aware that gender has any relevance to geography. So
the session on gender and environment starts by asking students to work in small
(mixed) groups to identify places where they feel ‘out of place’ because they are
male or female, and (an idea I adapted from a recent student text) to think of the