Being a Geographer: you're born with it

As I set out to get my mind focused on applying for PhD programs, I revisited the statement of intent I submitted for graduate school at California State University, Long Beach. Reading through it, I laugh at the eagerness and clear enthusiasm for geography I had then and still do. Finding a field you can throw your entire self into and still want to learn more is a blessing. This is what academic excitement is from a college undergrad: 

(partial) Statement of Intent: CSULB  

2008/9

                As a result of grade school geography sadly being compressed into social studies, history became my favorite subject. However, the allure of great empires and trade routes kept me drawn to maps; an antiqued map of the Roman Empire adorned my bedroom wall by seventh grade.   Upon entering Texas Christian University, I reluctantly followed a conformist path, choosing an Advertising/Public Relations major, and then switched to Communications. Until I discovered academic geography, misery and disappointment plagued my coursework. Fortunately, the day I took my seat in World Regional Geography, my professor started the class with her story of stumbling upon her geographic destiny.  Within the first three minutes, I was overwhelmed with memories, categorizing myself alongside my professor as a born geographer. Daydreaming, I remembered myself in grade school, constantly sketching world maps in the margins of my notes and always bent over a National Geographic at my grandma’s house. Spinning back to the reality of the classroom, I had heard exactly what I needed to start climbing my personal Mt. Everest. I realized it was possible to major and pursue a career in geography. As a geography major, I completely turned my academic performance around from doing poorly in previous majors to achieving straight A grades in geography.

                The Geography of Western Europe course refined my admiration for history and culture into a geographic framework.  We studied the “continental architecture” of Europe, and I began to understand how physical geography is the stage upon which history is set. Exploring the relationships between peoples crammed into their European homelands was fascinating.  The relentless unfolding of centrifugal and centripetal forces on the European continent opened the door to my interest in multidisciplinary studies for both historical and cultural geography and their relationships to physical geography. Two other courses, the Geography of Latin America and Cultural Geography, helped quench my thirst for case studies that intertwined history, culture, and physical geography. Now, I have even more questions and seek more knowledge and explanations.

                TCU has provided me with a well-balanced undergraduate course of study. In addition to the above courses, I have taken GIS, Applied Geography, and Urban Geography. As a result, I am eager to expand my knowledge without the pressures of one specific specialization. New topics tempt my curiosity every day. I can imagine myself researching site and situation characteristics of cities such as Troy or studying the diffusion of globalization into traditional indigenous peoples upriver from Manaus in the Amazon. All the unending possibilities in between fascinate my inner geographer.  A thesis topic relating to the preservation and assimilation of culture has been a constant consideration after hearing multiple presentations of this theme at the American Association of Geographers in 2008. I have acquired a lifelong appreciation for geography from the Geography Department at TCU. I cannot fathom pausing my education now, but I look forward to continuing my education at the graduate level.

            I attended the AAG meeting in Boston last year. Being surrounded by many people who understand why geography matters enabled me to have the most insightful and educated discussions of my life. That experience was the final push that cleared my thoughts about the near future. Undoubtedly, I would go to graduate school in geography. I realized that the possibilities for geographic research are endless and that any interest can be studied from a geographic perspective, which was thrilling. I will be co-presenting a poster paper at the AAG in Las Vegas.  This is the next opportunity to further my connections with geographers and extend my experience in research and presentation.  

            As a senior geography major at TCU, all I see when I look at a globe is how many regions and cultures I have yet to study.  I wish to expand my love of cultural and historical geography into more focused and advanced geographic studies. Graduate school will provide new challenges and opportunities and force me to open new roadways of intellectual curiosity at the intersection of culture, environment, history, and place. 

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I want my students to THINK!

Making Big Connections: Geography Assignment 
 
As a geographer, I see how everything connects. From the way the natural landscape molds the way we live to the way anti-immigrant policies in France impact the EURO, I seek to understand the networks. This is my number one objective while teaching World Regional Geography: for students to critically think about what they learn, read, and hear and ask themselves how it connects to other phenomena. 


I strive to achieve this not only by continually keeping discussions open about the topics we cover in class and asking, “What will the result be,” but also with the three mandatory assignments for the semester. I am continually collecting academic articles, editorial stories, and news stories about current topics in the world regions we cover in my class. Examples include “The Flight of Japan’s Immigrants” from Bloomberg BusinessWeek April 25-May 1, 2011; “Investigations: Africa’s Elephants” from The Informer 2011; and “Is the EU taking its over-fishing Habits to West African Waters” by John Vidal in The Guardian.  I have at least 11 articles for each of the nine world regions I teach. The AAG Smart Brief is a fantastic resource for these types of articles.

Students can choose to pick three articles to write individual responses to. The three responses must be from different regions, and each region’s response due date corresponds with the second day of the lecture related to that region. This is in hopes that students will share what they read with the class and relate it to the class material. Essentially, three times in the semester, every student will have something concrete and interesting to share and relate to the class that only one or two other students will also know (because of the multiple due dates and a large variety of articles).

But the response itself is where I am pushing students to do something they rarely do these days in college, much less in the liberal arts: critical thinking. Summarizing and interpretation are the typical requests for these types of assignments, but not here. I give students the benefit of the doubt that they can summarize a 1000-word article. What I do not expect them to do, at first, is to “find” a multidisciplinary interrelationship. What in the world do I mean by that? 

An example is probably best here; after reading the article “The Year of the Dragon” in Bloomberg BusinessWeek that does not mention migration, urban change, or cultural tensions, this student wrote this paragraph showing the reader a multidisciplinary interrelationship between the article material and the ethnic tensions in China learned about in class. 
 
 “As family size in China increases, due to the Year of the Dragon, parents will predictably seek more income and larger homes.  At some point, affordable urban housing will become scarcer and more expensive because of the increase in demand. The Year of the Dragon will contribute to China’s already overly crowded eastern cities, which could lead to a steady urban-to-rural migration of middle and upper-income families. This would contrast with the massive rural-to-urban migration by poor Chinese.  Specifically, people might move to the western part of China, which is less crowded and developed, resembling a “go west” mentality in the US. One of the negative outcomes of this change in migration could be an increase in cultural problems with ethnic minorities, such as tensions between Han Chinese and both the Tibetans and Muslims in the western part of China. This may lead to a major conflict between China's coastal and western parts.”

The actual core directions are: Examine at least one multidisciplinary interrelationship (political, economic, geopolitical, military, social, ethnic, etc.) that relates to the article. For example, an essay on Russian weapons sales to Iran can consider the interrelationships from (1) its geopolitical consequences to the US and/or (2) the benefits to the Russian economy (explain to me how this relates to different countries/regions of the world). This information is not in the article, after reading the article I want you to ask yourself, “what does that mean for the people, cities, region, neighborhood, or country in the article or those not mentioned?” Once you latch on to an idea of what will change on the ground due to what you just read, ask yourself more detailed (small-scale) questions. For example, how will this affect family size, cultural exchange, globalization, tourism, food prices, migration patterns, acculturation, homogenized markets,  local or regional health, city layouts, population patterns, and so on? You will be on the right track when you start to answer these questions. Show me you can think geographically.

For the first time in the semester, when my Dropbox fills with student responses on various topics with different connections, I prepare for a long week. This type of critical thinking activity asks students to sit back and take the time to explore with their minds what the implications of what they just learned might be “on the ground” is, unfortunately, minuscule in their college careers. For their first of the three responses, students almost always turn in a summary with a few predictions without any strong supportive reason; thus, I give excessive feedback and direction. I truly want students to “get it!” When I have a student make a big connection, and I can read their enthusiasm for their accomplishment, I am satisfied. By the third response, 90% of my students had knocked me off my socks! I think, “Wow, that is cool, that is absolutely possible!” Nothing is more exciting than a student unleashing their own exploratory thought process and coming up with something new and exciting.

I somewhat dread grading/commenting on the 1^st responses, but I get giddy to read their 3^rd responses! 

Check out that divergent boundary! 

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Conversational Classroom with Partial-Note Handout

New Take on Class Notes


One of the difficulties felt by all teachers, I am sure, is the feeling of “if I did it, you can do it.”  Even though I am only a few years removed from my students I have this feeling over and over. The most prevalent topic related to this perspective is note-taking.  Geography is a discipline dependent on a vast amount of knowledge in a variety of forms, thus insisting on a detailed orientation to class notes.  This was only intensified for me, being fascinated by every word from my professors and writing down almost every syllable. In addition, I was only two courses away from a double major in History. Naturally, history class is not intensive. With these two disciplines dominating my college experience, I have no impression of class time without coming away with plus 10 pages of notes. 




This experience has possibly (probably) left me in a predisposed position that is not favored by my students. I am not sure when the switch happened, possibly even when I was in college, but a transition has been made that inclines students to expect their professors to give them the powerpoint slides (essentially all the notes). This was an absolute “no” for the first four weeks of my first-semester of teaching. This was based on both my high standards of students’ abilities to take notes, but the fact I was only completing that day’s lecture (power point) at the earliest a few hours before class would not have fit that model. However, after we had a four-day weekend that entailed me boarded up in my attic apartment, only coming down to heat up a can of soup and throw Izzi a stick during those two minutes, I could “get ahead.”  Once, I had a steady lead on my PowerPoint presentations. I had just enough “extra time” to copy the power points over and remove the “important words” and “details.” This was a compromise, and it worked, ok.  Of course, the slides were too extensive, as a result of my desire to teach it ALL. Nevertheless, the students were very grateful, and I understand the benefit of having the majority of the notes so you can actually listen to the professor and not focus on writing every word. I held onto my “but I did it” mentality, however, under my breath.

So, now that I have a repertoire of complete PowerPoint presentations that I could edit, clean, condense, and reorganize for efficiency over the Christmas break, I was able to create a “follow along.” I took the text from the slide shows, organized it in an outline format, and again, left out the key points, essential words, and details. This was all given to them online when the semester started. I am a facilitating instructor, meaning I always ask for the information before I give it to them. To do this, it was very important to take out any words or phrases that would allow them to “guess” the correct answer to my questions by filling in the blank. The outline also has complete wholes that require an entire “note-taking” fill-in. This took several weeks to perfect, but so far, this has been a great addition to my classroom (even at the expense of my own stubbornness).

The first benefit is being able to prohibit laptops in my classroom with a clear conscience. I would have never survived my classes without being able to type my notes, so I had to justify sanctioning them. Previously, I would have been trying not to notice when a student had not looked at me in class but only at his screen. In addition, I was continually worried computers were distracting others who truly wanted to focus but were inhibited.  Taking laptops out of the equation allows my students to fully engage in the classroom conversation that takes up most of my class. This has been a huge lift to my composure in my classroom, knowing I have their full attention and can rest assured they will all participate, even if it is out of lack of a better distraction.

If there was anything I learned from my first semester teaching college courses, it was “learn to modify.” As time progressed, I learned what worked and did not work and why. Leaving the past strict note-taking, professor-endlessly lecturing classroom environment behind and embracing a partial-note-giving, conversational classroom environment has been an inspiring transformation that I plan to keep working on and sharing.

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World Regional Geography: Overcoming Difficulties in Teaching this Class

New perspective: Second Semester as a Geography Professor  

One of the underlying themes that jumped out at me while I was reading my student evaluations from my first-semester of teaching was animosity toward the nature of the course itself. Those projected feelings were explicitly targeted at the circumference of the course, which for World Regional Geography is the entire world. As an instructor, handed a text book covering the physical, historical, political, environmental, social, economic, and cultural geography of the world’s dominate regions and expected to cover it within one semester is boggling, making it easy to sympathize with students. I, too, felt the walls closing in on me when I realized the pressure of teaching THE WORLD. 

Starting last semester (my first teaching this course), I had a sympathetic approach that gave an air of apologies for the enormity of information I would give my students and, consequently, testing them over. However, this did not create reciprocal sympathy from my students towards my endeavor of providing them with the best representation of a region to my abilities in only three days. Like I said previously, it instead created animosity towards the course, “covering way too much,” “requiring way too many notes,” and resulting in comments such as, “the whole world shouldn’t be covered, maybe half the regions.” I teach 9 of the 10-12 regions in your typical geography textbook (everyone is different). 

This is a topic among geographers at national and global conferences every year. “How do we approach World Regional Geography?” This is the course that introduces and pulls in “new recruits” to our discipline around the world. For most students pursuing an education in other fields, World Regional Geography is the key to giving them a window into the world and how it relates to their lives. These responsibilities traditionally handed to World Regional Geography professors are understandably substantial.   As a geography professor, the real difficulty is deciding what needs to be covered and what, resisting your own personal interests and desire to teach it ALL, can be overlooked.

However, back to the issue of animosity towards the responsibility we put on non-geography majors to absorb the immense amount of knowledge presented during a World Regional Geography course. To combat reading the same comments at the end of this semester, I took a new attitude into the first day of class: “if that does not spark your interest, then this is not the course for you.”

Yes, I spent the second half of the first day with my students going through the tell-tell signs they should look for other classes that match their interests in substitute for mine.  This may seem harsh, but by the early vital signs, I think both of my classes will be incredible learning experiences for every student. So what exactly did I say?

While there are other things I will detail in later articles, these were the three “kickers,” or most important reasons to either stay and “have one of the most influential and grand classes of your college career, or find another class to suit your “check out, and copy the board” approach of going to class, because that is not what I am offering.”

Firstly, I did not hide the large amount of work necessary to succeed in World Regional Geography. There were no blinders to hide the average 30-40 pages of notes (which I will explain in a later article) required to study for each exam, not to mention the complexity of those notes (covering several themes of geography). Instead, I pointed out the name of the course and made it clear I would do my best to give them an eye-opening experience in each of the world regions but to do that, there would be a world of information to give them and subsequently to study. This was presented as a responsibility for every student, not as a consequence of the class. 

My expectations are very high and include embracing the knowledge they willingly signed up to absorb. This was the first step in moving away from apologizing for the enormity of the class and giving the students the choice to commit themselves to be participant learners out of interest, even in the face of a huge task. This is a worldly class for knowledge-seeking students, not those only seeking a GE credit (general education). Now that this was made clear, I do not expect any more “maybe only cover half the world” comments, because it was a distinctive choice to take on the world, not half.

Secondly, I was honest about my perspective. Geography is a dynamic discipline; each geographer has a different specialty and most importantly a facet of geography that stirs their heart. Mine is cultural and historical geography. So, instead of apologizing for a historical-geographic viewpoint leading the classroom, I explained my background and why I believe that view best explains the territories grouped together we call “world regions” today. Then I simply said, “if the examples I just provided do not give you an “aw ha” moment and/or the thought of hearing about how the physical and cultural geography influenced the history of a region/country, while at the same time learning how history influenced the cultural geography we see today, then this is not the class for you.”


We all have different interests and backgrounds. College, therefore, should not be a place to check off your core classes but to apply the knowledge you gain from the diverse mix you pick to those interests and specialties. This makes students more marketable and well-rounded and prepares them for a lifetime of new information, continually enhancing or questioning their perceived knowledge. There are so many “electives” to choose from on a college campus and all have their own unique way of improving a student’s overall education, however every “elective” is not for every student. Now, I do not dread comments regarding “too much history.” That is my training and perspective; plenty of courses and even World Regional Geography classes from a different perspective are available. The four students who did not come back the next day will be much more engaged in other classes, and I am glad they are seeking the type of course that interests them most. 

The third “kicker” I divulged was the most intriguing to most students, I presume, from their reactions. Teaching for me is centered on facilitating, a part of my training at CSULB that I will discuss in a later article. Specifically, this means, “I do not want to talk for an hour and a half and spoon-feed you information to store in your brains and then spit out on a test.” Instead, my goal is to “get the information from you. I want to facilitate conversation and discussions that ultimately lead the entire class to the main point.” For this type of classroom environment to happen and be as much encouraged by students as I am, students have to make a commitment to participate. Not only a commitment to me but also to each other. To my delight, that is exactly what I witnessed. 

After explaining this type of atmosphere and why it was necessary for the class's success, I asked them to stand up and raise their hand if they intended to stay and commit to being a vital part of a learning community. Everyone stood up and reacted excitedly to being expected to talk back to their professor. We covered some key concepts necessary for the rest of the course and used them to show how I would conduct the class. Almost every other sentence is a question posed to the class to interpret, give examples, opinions, objections, or explain.

Most students in both classes kept their commitments, and the first two days were full of insightful hypotheses, ideas, and examples they used to make the topics personal and understandable for them and others. Therefore, I hope to put to bed the comments of “too many questions,” “expects us to know more already,” and “too high of expectations.” These students made a visible commitment to their classmates, and the initial results have been very promising. 

In all, this semester I chose to be clear about what I expected from my students and what they should be prepared to undertake in my class before they fully committed. It is now in their hands to make this class what they want it to be, instead of being subject to an impossibly large body of information, imposed by a sympathetic professor. Now, they are engaged, active learners willingly taking on the responsibilities of the class. 

I cannot wait for week two! 

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First semester as a Geography Professor (while the DCC making the team season 6 aired simulations)

Thanksgiving is over, and all the students are now sluggishly trying to kick-start their brains to get through the last two weeks of the semester. As a first-year college professor, on the other hand, my thoughts race as I try to keep my “lead” and finish my last few lectures. What I mean by a “lead” is somewhat of an academic joke, especially for first-time professors. Daily, I am consumed with filling my PowerPoints with exciting and important information coupled with maps, pictures, and graphs that help visualize the information. Nothing is provided to new professors to accomplish this. So you must create every PowerPoint, every quiz, and exam “as you go,” and hope you can maintain your “lead.” I have nightmares of not getting tomorrow's lecture done in time, and there have been plenty of close calls. More than once, I have pressed the save button, ripped my flash drive from my office computer, and run across campus to deliver the lecture I just finished in the nick of time. Each PowerPoint has been painstakingly created after days of pouring over my notes, book reading, data collection, and NatGeo image searches.

I love what I do, and I truly believe the information I am presenting to my students benefits their education and development and the future of our country. That may seem like a grandiose statement, but when I open up my lecture by asking, “What is going on in the Middle East/North Africa” and no one can tell me about the governing transition of multiple countries, such as, Morocco most recently, Tunisia, and more than likely, Egypt, I realize how important my responsibility is.

Embracing this obligation to bring faraway images of shanty towns in Mumbai, population decline throughout Europe and Russia, human rights issues in the far west of China, new economic prospects in Southeast Asia, political change in the Middle East/North Africa, and loss of biodiversity in the Amazon and Madagascar, is a passion. To do this well, I have continuously stayed glued to my desk until well past 1 am every night this semester to make these, and many other real-world phenomena, understandable to my students. My greatest delight is not only bringing the issues to light my goal but also helping my students find their geographic thinking skills and see how these phenomena affect other seemingly unrelated issues. We would not have the Amazon without the Sahara’s fertilizing dust being swept across the Atlantic and supplementing the poor Amazonian soils. It is essential to understand Africa’s lack of internal transportation networks in hopes of finding solutions to its crippling poverty. When students have an “a ha” moment by relating Arctic oil to US foreign policy or EU development, I have done my job.

I am ready for Christmas break. I can not wait to take a deep breath and relish in completing each lecture (even if only moments before delivery time), saving me from having to fake an illness to avoid an awkward “I didn’t get it done” moment. I have learned so much from this semester and cannot wait to edit and add to my now semi-composed lectures covering the world with its incredibly unique regions. 

 

Geography in action! Venice, Italy 

PS. I entered this stage of life as Season Six of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders Making the Team Aired. 

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