Dear Critters,
Could I take this opportunity to shamelessly plug a paper and sessions that I
am involved in at this year’s RGS conference in Edinburgh. I have recently
completed some analysis of department data from the UK and a survey of
Geography departments about their administrative / managerial ‘place’ within
their institutions and about changing trends over the last 15-20 years. I,
along with my colleague Phil Toms, are presenting the results in the paper:
"Where's the Geography department?": the changing administrative place of
Geography in British higher education.
The paper explores changes to the administration and management of Geography
and Geographers within British higher education since the mid-1990s. Drawing
on data on changing departmental names and configurations and a survey of
Geography departments / schools / institutes / divisions etc. in British
higher education institutions it notes a trend away from the autonomous
Geography department towards a variety of multi-disciplinary units. The
paper maps these changing departmental configurations, the reasons for them
and their impacts on staff practices and the nature and security of Geography
as a discipline within British higher education. It also explores evidence
on the direction of change in the near future. This empirical analysis is
grounded within the literatures on departmental change in higher education,
the production of British geography (Sidaway, 1997) and the future of
geography (Thrift, 2002).
The paper is part of the session:
Interdisciplinarity: pedagogy, (in)security and geography
Session convenors: Mark McGuinness (Bath Spa University, UK), Tim Hall,
Charlie Parker, Phil Toms (University of Gloucestershire, UK)
This session will be joint sponsored by the Higher Education Academy (STEM
cluster) and the Higher Education Research Group of the RGS-IBG
There has been sustained growth in the institutional discourse and practice
of interdisciplinarity in the delivery of UK higher education programmes over
several years. The development of interdisciplinary content or the sharing of
modules between courses has become an increasingly common tactic within
higher education recently and seems likely to increase in the future. This
has seen both ‘forced marriages’ and ‘imaginative coalitions’ arise between
Geographers and a host of other disciplines including Biology, Earth Science,
Sociology, History, Business and many others.
Whilst undoubtedly addressing resource and efficiency drivers, greater
interdisciplinary working may also be pursued for the opportunities created
for widening student choice and pedagogic enhancement across disciplines.
The session organisers seek research papers or case studies that outline the
experience of interdisciplinary working in undergraduate and postgraduate
Geography programmes in the UK and internationally. We seek to explore issues
such as the impact of greater interdisciplinarity on
- the student experience of learning and teaching in our programmes
- the pedagogic framework in which programmes are delivered
- how fieldwork is positioned (and costed) within interdisciplinary activity
- the development of disciplinary architectures and aims of programmes
- the enhancement or reduction of academic freedom, autonomy and morale
There are also a number of other sessions that explore various facets of the
provisional, uncertain position of geography within the political economy of
higher education at the conference including another I am involved in ‘When
is a geographer not a geographer?’ with Pauline Couper from Marjon.
Best wishes,
Tim
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