“Did Ronald McDonald Also Tend To Scare You As A Child?”: Working to Emplace Consumption, Commodities and Citizen-Students in a Large Classroom Setting

Abstract

So-called 'radical' and 'critical' pedagogy seems to be everywhere these days on the landscapes of geographical teaching praxis and theory. Part of the remit of radical/critical pedagogy involves a de-centring of the traditional 'banking' method of pedagogical praxis. Yet, how do we challenge this 'banking' model of knowledge transmission in both a large-class setting and around the topic of commodity geographies where the banking model of information transfer still holds sway? This paper presents a theoretically and pedagogically driven argument, as well as a series of practical teaching 'techniques' and tools-mind-mapping and group work-designed to promote 'deep learning' and a progressive political potential in a first-year large-scale geography course centred around lectures on the Geographies of Consumption and Material Culture. Here students are not only asked to place themselves within and without the academic materials and other media but are urged to make intimate connections between themselves and their own consumptive acts and the commodity networks in which they are enmeshed. Thus, perhaps pedagogy needs to be emplaced firmly within the realms of research practice rather than as simply the transference of research findings.

Transformative food systems education in a land-grant college of agriculture: the importance of learner-centered inquiries

“…Overall, students' reflections suggest that it is very powerful for them to confront the commodity fetish in their own inquiry processes, and that most did so even when not formally introduced to the concept. We agree with Goodman (2008) that this style of learning based on their own research experiences, rather than just being fed defetishization ''from on high'' in didactic lecture, is best. We hypothesize that it has more transformative potential because it is based on meaningful learning stemming from an authentic challenge, and learners feel compelled to reconcile existing understandings with new and different experiences that cannot be easily ignored.…”

Challenging Assumptions: Teaching, Documenting, Producing and Negotiating ‘Health’

“…Given that those calling for a more critical geography call for inherently self-conscious and reflexive approaches (Blomley, 2006), rather than just a critique of the 'state' of geography (Harvey, 2006), this level of debate is predictable. However, in all these discussions of 'doing' critical geography (Kitchen & Hubbard, 1999), there is still space for a deeper consideration of how sites such as the classroom, some of the fundamental motors of knowledge production, might be included with this conversation (Chatterton, 2008;Goodman, 2008).…”

“…Teaching should therefore aim to inspire and facilitate conceptual change and, in the process, the development of new meanings, rather than the simple transmission of information (Goodman, 2008). Derived from constructivist accounts of learning as a process of personal compilation of meaning, ascertaining conceptual change is a useful tool for those concerned with investigating the Negotiating 'Health' 353 kinds of meanings produced in and by the classroom.…”

“…In an applied sense, this lack of reflection seems short-sighted given the potential for health geographers to play a significant role in the exceptionally wide and cross-departmental realms of health policy (see Martin, 2001;Cummins, 2003). It is also marked in a pedagogical sense given the continued slowness of medical/health geography "to adopt and even critique alternative post-positivist traditions that have already begun to spread to other branches of the discipline" (Matthews, 1993, p. 91; see also Goodman, 2008). Indeed, the debate on teaching health/medical geography 1 seems stalled in 1995 (Matthews & Rosenberg, 1995a, 1995b, and current writings on the 'state' of the sub-discipline (see for example Asthana et al, 2002;Parr, 2002Parr, , 2004Mansfield, 2008) gloss over the teaching of health within geography, despite it being a daily reality for most self-defined health geographers.…”