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

Arts, humanities and social sciences
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kinds of images typically used on birthday cards for ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’. By using
their own diverse experiences to demonstrate how space might be gendered,
students’ own knowledge is both legitimised and gently challenged.
To explore how different theories are constructed, I present students with brief
written accounts from semi-academic pieces. They must read these quickly,
focusing not on the details of the argument, but on the language: ‘underline those
words or phrases which you find particularly striking’. For instance, one piece on
urban gentrification might be couched in the language of ‘urban pioneers’ while
another highlights flows of capital. I ask each student to call out one word or
phrase which I write up on the board; later, this rather distinctive selection of
words will be the vehicle for examining how knowledge is constructed in each
written account. Similarly, in investigating how environment might contribute to
crime, I focus on the case made in a influential book of the 1980s which has had
a significant impact on public policy. After a brief introduction, students read
(condensed versions of) a critical review of the book published in a geography
journal, the rejoinder from the book’s author, and the reviewer’s response in
return (each of these is written in a pretty vigorous style, which helps to spark
their interest). Working in pairs, students identify two positive points and two
negative points concerning the claims of the original book, and they write these
on overhead transparencies; I collect these transparencies, cut them into strips,
rearrange them and present them on the OHP. These then become my visual aid
for a mini-lecture on the debate over how environmental design determines social
behaviour. In a linked session, we debate the alternative strategies deployed to
control street crime and urban incivilities in the context of their own experiences
of the local nightlife, considering how these strategies reflect different underlying
assumptions about the structure of social life (including prejudices about
students), as well as different political agendas.
Students’ learning is assessed in two ways. The seen examination is a conventional
summative assessment of their capacity to engage with ideas. The other
element of assessment is a project on the social geography of a selected social
group in a particular locality, to be written up in the form of a journal article.
Each student negotiates the choice of topic with me early in the module (at which
stage I head off anything that sounds like a reworked A level project). Progress
is checked in individual tutorials which direct them to sources of information
they need to collect (statistics, field observations, interviews), and the books
or articles to contextualise their primary research. Students’ achievement on the
project element is usually high, and they evaluate the task as challenging but
fulfilling. I encourage them to think about expanding this topic for their
dissertations, so that the summative assessment in this module becomes
formative for the next level of study.
(Caroline Mills, University of Gloucestershire)