Interdisciplinary study is hard to achieve and to sustain. Students are faced with major challenges in w orking in and across several disciplines. These dif® culties re¯ect both contrasting disciplinary cognitive structures and the distinctive cultures that have emerged in different disciplines. This paper draw s on the w ork of Kolb and others to clarify some of these problems and to suggest w ays of helping students to becom e more self-aware as learners and more capable of effecting these moves betw een disciplines.
This paper suggests that geographers could profitably employ problembased learning (PBL) in the preparation of students for fieldclasses. Following a brief review of recent issues and contributions to teaching and learning on fieldclasses, the paper examines the characteristics of PBL and its application in other disciplines, especially medicine. It is argued that PBL encourages active and deep learning in students and can readily be applied to fieldwork preparation. A case study of such an application to a second-year undergraduate fieldclass is given.
This paper uses phenomenography to identify undergraduates' conceptions of teaching, learning and geography and examine whether there are any differences between students in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. The paper shows that there are several distinct conceptions of teaching, learning and geography. Teaching is seen as either information transfer or as helping learning. The study finds that geography students hold five of the conceptions of learning found by Marton et al. (1993). Student conceptions of geography range from the very general such as the study of the world or the study or the distinct physical and human dimensions of the world to ideas of geography as people-environment interactions or as spatial organization or of areal differentiation and the study of places. There are no clear patterns of national variation in the conceptions held by geography students. The implications for teaching and curriculum design of undergraduates' conceptions of geography are considered.
Growing diversity is focusing attention on the range of different student learning styles. This study assesses whether geographers have a predominant learning style and whether this varies between and within countries. The findings are based on over 900 geography students from 12 universities in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and the US, who completed Kolb's Learning Style Inventory (LSI). The implications for curriculum design and student learning strategies are discussed. It is suggested that departments should aim to produce balanced learners with a full range of learning capacities rather than simply matching teaching to existing learning styles.
This paper examines ethics in learning and teaching geography in higher education. It proposes a pathway towards curriculum and pedagogy that better incorporates ethics in university geography education. By focusing on the central but problematic relationships between (i) teaching and learning on the one hand and research on the other, and (ii) ethics and geography curricula, the authors' reflections illustrate how ethics may be better recognieed within those curricula. They discuss issues afecting teaching and learning about ethics in geography, and through identifcation of a range of examples identify ways to enhance the integration of ethical issues into university geography curricula.
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