Shifting landscapes: from coalface to quick sand? Teaching Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences in Higher Education

Abstract

In this paper we examine contemporary academic working lives, with particular reference to teaching‐only and teaching‐focused academics. We argue that intensification in the neoliberal university has significantly shifted the structure of academic careers, while cultural stories about those careers have not changed. We call for academics to re‐examine our collective stories about standard academic career paths. Challenging the stories and making visible the ways that they create and multiply disadvantage is a crucial step in expanding the possibilities for academic identities and careers. The paper begins by describing teaching‐focused academics within the context of the wider workforce. We then draw on narratives of those in these roles to illustrate the processes that (re)inscribe their marginalisation. We uncover the gendering of the teaching‐focused academic labour market. We end the paper by suggesting interventions that all academics can take and support to address the issues we highlight.

A capabilities approach to higher education: geocapabilities and implications for geography curricula

“…These logics have important and increasingly well-documented effects on the working lives of academics (Dowling 2008;Dyer et al, 2016;Gill 2009;Purcell 2007;Roberts 2000).…”

Geographers and the scholarship of teaching and learning

“…As with many disciplinary academics, geographers adopt a reflexive mind-set, open to critically examining the disciplinary histories that have played out within dynamic contexts and which have resulted in a plurality of knowledge production and academic practice (Sidaway & Johnston, 2007;Castree, 2011;Erickson, 2012;Dyer et al, 2016). Through their reflexivity, geographers have brought questions concerning higher education scholarship into mainstream discussions in the discipline, particularly in relation to the signature pedagogies of fieldwork (Cook et al, 2006;Herrick, 2010;Fuller, 2012) and spatial information handling (Kulhavy & Stock, 1996;Lloyd et al, 2002;Lloyd & Bunch, 2003).…”

Student experiences of multidisciplinarity in the undergraduate geography curriculum

“…These concerns covered a range of intellectual and institutional issues including: the precariousness of geographers' labour and the general conditions under which geographers work within an increasingly neoliberal academy and its disciplinary effects (Castree and Sparke, 2000;Demeritt, 2000;Dowling, 2008;Willis, 1996); the continuation of gendered inequalities within the discipline (Dyer, Walkington, Williams, Morton and Wyse 2016;Klocker, and Drozdzewski, 2012;Maddrell, Strauss, Thomas, and Wyse, 2015); disconnections between school and university geography (Castree, 2011); and a lack of visibility of geographical knowledge within public discourse despite its obvious relevance to pressing global issues (Murphy, De Blij, Turner II, Wilson Gilmore and Gregory, 2005). The UK witnessed a number of specific pressures on higher education generally and geography specifically which stemmed from: higher education reforms and their effects including the Browne Review (2010), Higher Education Funding Council for England fee reforms and student number controls (2012 and 2015), resource constraints, departmental reorganizations and attention to thresholds of viability for degree programmes and departments.…”