Student participation in municipal disaster drills can enhance geographic skill sets as well as build community resilience to local hazards. In these drills, students often assume the role of victims to help test local emergency response services. Teaching in an interdisciplinary department, we incorporate these field-based learning opportunities…

This paper establishes a novel niche by providing an original critical synthesis of the potentials and challenges of using public art to teach about, and "que(e)ry", sexuality, gender and space. The argument vouches for a critical pedagogy that pursues a visual politics for experiential and potentially transformative learning about…

Short fieldtrips offer unique opportunities to teach cultural relativism in context. Through travel, theatrical practices can be experienced as nodes in complex social webs, where the material aspects of performance are inseparable from the people who make, sponsor and attend performances. The author reflects on his experiences organising theatre…

Drawing from the importance of narrative inquiry in contemporary geographical reasoning and teaching, this paper focuses on some practices set around the relationship between maps and literature. Reader-generated maps, maps produced starting from the reading of a literary text, are at the core of a reflection on the potentialities of literary…

This article describes experiential-learning approaches to conveying the work and rewards involved in qualitative research. Seminar students interviewed one another, transcribed or took notes on those interviews, shared those materials to create a set of empirical materials for coding, developed coding schemes, and coded the materials using those…

This study contributes to the debate over the potential of film as a pedagogical aid. It argues that integrating film production into the assessment of undergraduate modules secures advantages for student learning: students connect their ideas more explicitly to "real world" examples; new voices and understandings are introduced to…

Narrative inquiry is an innovative means of encouraging students to internalize concepts, reflect on experiences or create applications for theoretical ideas. The use of first-person creative writing in a second-year cultural geography course prompted initial scepticism from students but eventually highlighted their constructivist engagement with…

In response to recent articles and ideas for experiential learning activities in human geography, this paper outlines a particular approach to learning about the body, difference, mobility and geographic space through experience. The Corporeal Marker Project designed and implemented by the authors provides a spatial experience of difference for…

Using a tour of Detroit as a case study, this article explains how a well-designed urban tour can make large-scale processes visible to students. Information is presented on ways in which the Detroit tour helped students think analytically about large-scale processes and about how teachers can adapt the Detroit format to tours of other cities. (DB)

Describes an instructional activity in which students collected and analyzed data from an urban environment. Explains that students developed an "urban attractiveness scale" and used it to rate different urban areas. Concludes that the exercise was effective as a learning activity. (CFR)

A three-year institute called "The Lodge Pole River Project" was designed to change educator perceptions of American Indian historical geography and encourage the creation of balanced and culturally sensitive American Indian K-12 curriculum. This project offered unique opportunities to assess a geography institute's impact upon teacher knowledge…

Advocates that geography teachers undertake field studies of human systems with their students. Describes a learning process in which teachers take students to a human system (supermarket, hotel) and guide them through exploration and analysis of the system with the goal of building skills that can transfer to other geographic tasks. (MJP)

Describes a community study project that uses history and the five fundamental themes of geography as a framework. The project involves organizing committees to study the need for a traffic signal in a small town. By studying various dimensions of the issue, the committees are able to demonstrate the need for a signal. (KO)

This 12th grade course in world geography is based on the philosophical assumption that human beings on earth make up a global village of interdependent people. It is world geography with a planetary perspective--an inquiry into the nature of the planet and its dominant species, Homo Sapiens. Seven units cover the following topics on physical and…

Techniques for making geography more relevant to elementary students are discussed. For example, the abstract ideas of latitude and longitude can be taught by having students "live" a grid system, i.e., evenly spaced letters and numerals posted on the classroom walls. An interdisciplinary approach is needed. (RM)