Category: education

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Videos to introduce lectures on geographies of popular culture

I give seven lectures on geographies of popular culture at the end of a 28-lecture torrent of social and cultural geography that is our first-year, first-term module “Geographies of Place, Identity & Culture‘.

We are asked to commence the actual lecture five minutes after the beginning of the session and end five minutes before, thus giving us 50 minutes of time to engage the students.

I have found that it can be rather awkward setting up and just waiting and watching the students pile in, while many of them sort of stare at you… so, I’m going to give them something else to look at!

I did this for one lecture last year and have now found a video for the first five minutes (-ish) of all seven. Here they are:

Introduction to Geographies of Popular Culture, begins with:

Lecture 2, geographies of music, begins with:

Lecture 3, geographies of life online, begins with:

Lecture 4, geographies of books & reading, begins with:

Lecture 5, geographies of cinema and TV, begins with:

Lecture 6, spaces of games and play, begins with:

Lecture 7, geographies of consumption, begins with:

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Reblog> Online resources to help students summarize journal articles and write critical reviews

Stuart Elden points to a post by Raul Pacheco-Vega on his blog that has some good resources to help students summarise what they read and to think about how to critically review other people’s work.

Online resources to help students summarize journal articles and write critical reviews

The courses I teach tend to be very practical and applied. My teaching philosophy is founded on helping my students acquire employable skills. Writing solid, robust, concise and easy-to-read analytical summaries should be an acquired tool that they then can transfer to other fields. Politicians, bureaucrats and high-level people in government that I’ve talked to have always considered summarizing information a great tool that undergraduate and graduate education should provide. Yet, the online resources I found to help students summarize journal articles and write critical reviews left me wanting.

AcWri handwritten notes and journal article reading

There are, of course, plenty of resources. But reading a vast majority of them always left me with a feeling that either they were too long for students to get through (in addition to the relatively high reading load I am assigning for each of my courses), or too focused on the mechanics and too little on the routine-building strategy. So I took to Twitter and Facebook to ask whether someone had found an online resource that would help my students learn how to summarize journal articles. Here are a few suggestions:

a) Dr. Karen Beckwith (Case Western Reserve University) shared with me her handouts on critical reading. Professor Beckwith is incredibly generous and I’m sure she would share them with you if you requested them. They are very useful because they are tailored to each specific course she teaches. She also has a guideline on how to learn from movies.

b) John McMahon (CUNY) shared with me some of his handouts, which are posted online, including this one on critical reading and note-taking. John and I have a different view on highlighting journal articles, and I will write a blog post on this soon.

c) Tressie McMillan Cottom (Virginia Commonwealth University) shared with me her notes from a grad seminar with Regina Werum at Emory University. Professor McMillan Cottom’s notes are a summary of how to read a sociology article.

d) Dr. Neenah Luna-Estrella (NEU) suggested the following books to help students learn how to read and summarize scholarly (and not so scholarly) works. Not online resources, but still, very good ones.

Pyrczak, F. (2014). Evaluating research in academic journals (6th ed.). Glendale, CA: Pyrczak Publishing.

Harris, R. A. (2011). Using Sources Effectively (3rd ed.). Glendale, CA: Pyrzak Publishing.

e) Online resources that I found valuable:
– University of the Fraser Valley Writing Centre’s guide to summarizing an article – this is particularly good because UFV is primarily undergraduate teaching.
– Donna Vandergrift ‘s handout actually gives a guideline for students on which content should be written in each paragraph. This kind of detailed guidance is fundamental.
– This guide on how to read a journal article is a bit long, but it does have some additional references that you can look at.

f) Karra Kshimabukuro shared the guide to writing a Rhetorical Precis, which is a tool that others had suggested we should look at, and apparently, (what I call “analytical summaries”may be rhetorical precis too :) (thanks Theresa MacPhail for reminding me of this!)

I’m happy to continue compiling resources if you want to drop a comment on this post or send me an email (sometimes my commenting system isn’t the best).

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Reblog> I am not here to satisfy you: the NSS and our institutional knickers

Hester Parr tweeted this post by Julie Cupples from a few months ago. As an early career academic on probation it’s difficult to stick your head above the parapet, and os it’s great when you read someone else doing it. This post really does resonate with my feelings about teaching in a university and how that can or should be valued…

There are also some good comments, so take a look.

I am not here to satisfy you: the NSS and our institutional knickers

The neoliberal endeavour to convert university students into consumers is underpinned by a survey culture that is constantly attempting to measure a thing called ‘student satisfaction’. It’s part of the way universities compete with one another and manufacture what is termed the ‘student experience’. In the neoliberal academy, students, faculty and staff are constantly surveyed, a phenomenon that a New Zealand academic has recently described as a tyranny that may “degrade student achievement” and “harm staff” (Heinemann 2015). If you borrow an interloan, ask IT to fix a software issue on your computer, or order sandwiches for a meeting from the preferred corporate supplier, you’re then likely to be sent a survey to assess the level of customer satisfaction with the service. It’s tedious but fortunately most of them can be quickly ignored and deleted. But the survey that seems to produce a bizarre level of managerial emphasis and concern that is quite hard to ignore is the National Student Survey (NSS). In my view, NSS obsession is producing quite pernicious and pedogogically impoverishing outcomes. For those outside the UK, the NSS began in 2005. It is commissioned by HEFCE and carried out by Ipsos Mori. Students are asked 23 questions which relate to student satisfaction and the learning experience (see thestudentsurvey.com for more detail). It then produces scores and rankings to add to the dozens of other league tables in which contemporary universities jostle for position and which get deployed in a highly selective manner in university spin.

The biggest problem with the idea of student satisfaction is that our principal aim as educators should not be to satisfy students. My teaching philosophy is composed in part of the following ideas:

I am not here to satisfy you. I am here to encourage you to interrogate your existing knowledges and possibly your own privilege. This is likely to be a deeply unsettling and uncomfortable process, especially if your class, race or gender location has never required you to interrogate your worldview and how it harms and excludes. I will however do my best to inspire you and encourage you to think. 

In fact, our aim should be to unsettle our students, especially the most privileged ones, not to satisfy them. It can often be satisfying to have your pre-existing values and worldviews endorsed (which is why people with right-wing views tend to watch Fox News for example rather than MSNBC or Democracy Now). While it might be energizing to have them challenged, and sometimes clearly is, for some students it can be deeply and profoundly dissatisfying. Some students react negatively when they are exposed to explicitly feminist perspectives or are forced to confront how they continue to benefit from the legacies of colonialism or white privilege. Engagement with these issues starts at university but is probably not resolved if ever until much later in a student’s life. By the time I graduated after four years of study, I had begun to rethink my worldviews. It wasn’t until much later than I gained a much deeper insight into my own politics and cultural assumptions and began to reformulate them. So if students are dissatisfied, it could be because we are doing our jobs properly, not because we are failing.

Read the rest of the post.

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Repost> The metric tide: an agenda for responsible indicators in research

The launch of the report on the review into the role of metrics in HE over on the Gaurdian,..

The metric tide: an agenda for responsible indicators in research

Across research, the metric tide is rising. An independent report published today argues that we have the opportunity to influence how it washes through higher education and research.

The Metric Tide
 The Metric Tide, the report of the UK’s independent review of the role of metrics in research is published today. Photograph: JL-Pfeifer/Shutterstock.com


Yesterday’s Budget brought good news for those vice-chancellors who have been lobbying to raise student tuition fees above the current £9,000 annual cap. But it came with a sting in the tail: George Osborne said that fees could rise in line with inflation only for those universities “that demonstrate excellence in teaching”. This will be assessed through a new Teaching Excellence Framework, or TEF, to be introduced alongside the Research Excellence Framework (REF), which is used to allocate around £1.6 billion each year on the research side of the system.

Good quote further down:

Metrics should support, not supplant, expert judgement. In our consultation with the research community, we found that peer review, despite its flaws and limitations, continues to command widespread support. We all know that peer review isn’t perfect, but it is still the least worst form of academic governance we have, and should remain the primary basis for assessing research papers, proposals and individuals, and for assessment exercises like the REF. At the same time, carefully selected and applied quantitative indicators can be a useful complement to other forms of evaluation and decision-making. A mature research system needs a variable geometry of expert judgement, quantitative and qualitative indicators. Academic quality is highly context-specific, and it is sensible to think in terms of research qualities, rather than striving for a single definition or measure of quality.

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Being a sharing academic

Recently I compiled a list of active (i.e. regularly updated) geography blogs and it got me musing about how we variously construct and perform our academic identities. These are some half-formed thoughts on a train about this in relation to uses of blogging [then edited in my office…].

It was a surprise to me how quite a few of those blogs, with some honourable exceptions, are tightly focussed conduits for personal research and are not participating in wider online/offline conversations. One of the big claims made for blogging in the noughties was, of course, that ‘social’ media precisely enable broader conversations. While the majority of those active geography bloggers I found use wordpress.com for their blogs they do not seem to use the ‘social’  functions such as ‘reblog’ and other conversation tools on the platform.

Now, I recognise that I am just as guilty as any in this (although I don’t use wordpress.com).  I do, at least, try and share other people’s work – especially cos this blog cross-posts to Twitter. That multi-platform-ness is also important, blogs aren’t the be-all-and-end-all of convening such conversations. For example, while it is persistently bemoaned, the JiscMail list ‘Crit-Geog-Forum‘ has hosted some interesting discussions amongst anglophone geographers.

There are, of course, lots of resources, endorsements and manifestos for academic blogging within and beyond a variety of disciplinary contexts. On this, I heartily recommend reading The Virtues of Blogging as Scholarly Activity (in The Chronicle) by my former boss Martin Weller, and his open access book The Digital Scholar. See also, for example, the posts about blogging on the LSE’s Impact of Social Sciences blog, and this piece on what makes a successful research blog by Pat Thomson in particular.

This leads me to the perpetual tension between two, often-opposing, pulls on how (in very broad terms) we perform academic identity: the ‘lone wolf’ syndrome of career progression and the aspiration to contribute to the collective production of knowledge.

On the one hand, to progress, especially as an early career academic, it is (sadly) important to develop a recognisable ‘project’ or ‘brand’ to allow employers to easily categorise you (probably to slot you into a REF submission), and this more-often-than-not involves ploughing an individual furrow – writing the position papers, getting single author papers published for a REF submission, applying for individual funding (such as the ESRC’s ‘Future Research Leader’ scheme), and attempting to speak to the fashionable debates (e.g. the ‘anthropocene’, ‘mobilities’ and ‘neoliberalism’). I am by no means against such actions (apart from the instrumental logics that sit behind a lot of it), these are part and parcel of being an academic, but it often feels to me that this leads to a lot of individuals talking past one another.

On the other hand, we all (I hope) aspire to advancing knowledge around those things about which are passionate and this must surely be a collective endeavour. Some of the very best events I have attended have been the small workshops where people present ideas, not in a scripted and tightly timed presentation, but in more discursive, less-pressured ways.

Surely blogging can address both of these drives: you can promote your work, but (and for me – more importantly) you can contribute to conversations and celebrate one another’s work. This is, broadly, what it can mean to participate in a community of practice as Lave & Wenger suggest (although–I don’t agree with everything in the linked piece).

We could all, perhaps, take a few more ‘risks’ and put our ideas ‘out there’ a little more to involve people in their development, rather than simply present our polished final argument/ results. My own academic hero in this regard is Anne Galloway, who’s intellectual curiosity and generosity has been an inspiration to me. From her PhD-related blog PLSJ, through to her subsequent blogs/projects the design culture lab and the more-than-human lab, Anne has offered insights, provocations and opened conversations. Indeed, Anne’s chapter on blogging in her PhD thesis is a really interesting and helpful (and probably more rigorous!) way of thinking about what I’m trying to get at here.

I recognise that for those early in their careers and those that feel embattled and under increasing institutional pressure this feels almost impossible, but(!) –I’d argue that the potential gains are worth it. I’ve found fantastically generous colleagues across the world through social media, who have profoundly enriched my work and I heartily recommend it.

I’ll conclude this post with (celebrating/advocating) some excerpts from Mel Gregg’s article ‘Feeling Ordinary: Blogging as conventional scholarship‘ that sum up what I’m trying to say better than I can (especially after lots and lots of marking!):

The participatory nature of writing, response and counter-argument on blogs allows for ongoing debate, critical refinement and thinking-in-process. In this sense, what is rarely acknowledged about blogging is how much it contributes to and mirrors traditional scholarly practice rather than threatening it. (p. 154)

Blogs are a modest political tool in that they can help overturn the hierarchies of speech traditionally securing academic privilege
[…]
Blogs allow us to write in conjunction with non-academic ‘peers’ and ‘colleagues’ who not only value and improve our ideas but practice their own rigorous forms of assessment, critique and review.
Blogs are counter-heroic in that they expose the life of the academic as banal. They help lay bare the fallacy of the ivory tower scholar secluded from the concerns of the ‘real world’ (pp.157-158)

If the grandiose aspiration of ‘making new contributions to knowledge’ is to hold any truth it surely has to be a collective endeavour. To misquote Beckett: ‘Share again, share better’.

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Out now > Bernard Stiegler – States of Shock: stupidity and knowledge in the 21st century

Those of you vaguely interested in the work of Bernard Stiegler, and perhaps those of you who are not (yet!) will I hope take note of the publication of an important work by Stiegler: States of Shock: stupidity and knowledge in the 21st century [a translation by Daniel Ross of États de choc:  betise et savoir dans XXIe siecle].

Here’s the blurb from the publisher Polity:

In 1944 Horkheimer and Adorno warned that industrial society turns reason into rationalization, and Polanyi warned of the dangers of the self-regulating market, but today, argues Stiegler, this regression of reason has led to societies dominated by unreason, stupidity and madness. However, philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century abandoned the critique of political economy, and poststructuralism left its heirs helpless and disarmed in face of the reign of stupidity and an economic crisis of global proportions.

New theories and concepts are required today to think through these issues. The thinkers of poststructuralism Lyotard, Deleuze, Derrida must be re-read, as must the sources of their thought, Hegel and Marx. But we must also take account of Naomi Klein’s critique of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School and her account of the ‘shock doctrine’. In fact, argues Stiegler, a permanent ‘state of shock’ has prevailed since the beginning of the industrial revolution, intensified by the creative destruction brought about by the consumerist model. The result has been a capitalism that destroys desire and reason and in which every institution is undermined, above all those institutions that are the products par excellence of the Enlightenment the education system and universities.

Through a powerful critique of thinkers from Marx to Derrida, Stiegler develops new conceptual weapons to fight this destruction. He argues that schools and universities must themselves be transformed: new educational institutions must be developed both to take account of the dangers of digitization and the internet and to enable us to take advantage of the new opportunities they make available.

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Reflecting on the field trip to Kilburn

Montage of Kilburn High Road using pictures taken by the author

At the end of October 2014, I accompanied 140 students in their first year of studying geography at the University of Exeter on a field trip to London to put into practise some of what they have learned so far on the BA Geography course. While many of the activities were located in central London locations, including Hyde Park and the V&A museum, all 140 students also visited Kilburn. You may ask: Why? Obvious answers would include that ‘it’s a diverse area’, with which you may or may not agree. Then again, as Zadie Smith argued, at the launch of her novel “NW”: “But that is only the dullest thing that can be said about Kilburn, that’s it’s so ‘diverse’.”

We took the students to Kilburn for a number of reasons: that it is precisely not ‘central London’ but still has carries the attributes of being situated within a ‘world city’ like London; that immigration has helped shape Kilburn in interesting ways; that the High Road marks a boundary, between Brent and Camden; and, significantly for me at least, because Kilburn has previously been an inspiration to the geographer Doreen Massey.

In her 1991 article “A Global Sense of Place”, Massey uses the narrative of a walk down Kilburn High Road to illustrate the various ways we can understand feelings of place not as territories encompassed by boundaries but instead as ‘articulated moments in networks of social relations’. It is the vitality and the various movements, the comings and goings of shoppers, families, locals and visitors alike, the businesses opening and closing: all of these connections through space AND time that come to make up our sense of place. This is the shared ‘Kilburnosity’ about which Zadie Smith writes. For Massey, places – and Kilburn in particular – are not solely local. The global threads through the local (producing those movements of people, money and goods) and, in the same way, the local builds the global.

The students enjoyed their brief exposure to ‘Kilburnosity’ and I enjoyed the questions Kilburn prompted them to begin to ask of themselves in the process: of how ‘places’ get continually made and of our various roles in that process. I think we all began to see why Zadie Smith boldly stated: “I’d rather walk down Kilburn High Road than the King’s Road – than any road in London. For selfish reasons: there’s so much more to see, and hear.”

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Reblog> Top ten questions for the PhD oral exam

Over on Medium, there’s a post by Patrick Dunleavy, shared by a few people (I saw it cos of Jo Sharp), about the kinds of questions you get when undergoing a ‘viva’, which for those with their heads still buried in text may come as a surprise”¦ As Dunleavy points out, the oral exam (in my limited experience of the British context) tends to be quite a general discussion. Its worth a read, especially for those about to go through the exam, so I’ve reproduced it here.

When you have finally finished writing a PhD dissertation or thesis, and submitted it to the university for review, you are at the end of a long period of grappling with dozens of tricky and detailed problems and issues. For instance, how to upgrade the dodgy paragraph on page 102; what the sources were for Figure 5.7; or how to best (re-)phrase your hypotheses or expectations so as to fit the research you actually did. Perhaps for some weeks after submission these kinds of concerns will buzz around your head. They may even prompt you to lie awake at night rehearsing answers to the examiners, if they should ask about why you did x at one point, instead of y.Yet an oral examination of a doctorate (a ‘viva’ in British parlance) is rarely just an exercise in ‘Spot the problem’/ ‘Frame an answer’ mode. Many PhDers are surprised to find themselves immersed in a far more generalist (albeit still highly professional) conversation than they had initially anticipated. To prepare effectively for the big day and avoid being blind-sided you may need to change mindset a lot. The oral exam is a crucial session where you almost always need to reconnect with some fundamental themes and claims in your work. You need to think ahead to the issues that examiners often have when they read unfamiliar work, implemented in a way that is new to them. Their concerns generally revolve around: Is this legitimate innovation and focusing? Or it it instead somewhat weird? PhD examiners are guardians of the professional temple, so these issues weigh a lot with them. (These sit alongside some more prosaic concerns, like checking you really did the work yourself, and that you did all that you say you have) The opportunity to meet you in person is key to assuaging these wider concerns.

Here’s where the Top 10 list of questions below can come in useful, as a frame to encourage you to think wider and more generally about the professional conversation to come.

Value-added and originality

  • What are the most original (or value-added) parts of your thesis?
  • Which propositions or findings would you say are distinctively your own?
  • How do you think your work takes forward or develops the literature in this field?
  • What are the ‘bottom line’ conclusions of your research? How innovative or valuable are they? What does your work tell us that we did not know before?

Origins and the scope of the research

  • Can you explain how you came to choose this topic for your doctorate What was it that first interested you about it? How did the research focus change over time?
  • Why have you defined the final topic in the way you did? What were some of the difficulties you encountered and how did they influence how the topic was framed? What main problems or issues did you have in deciding what was in-scope and out-of-scope?

Methods

  • What are the core methods used in this thesis? Why did you choose this approach? In an ideal world, are there different techniques or other forms of data and evidence that you’d have liked to use?

Data or information

  • What are the main sources or kinds of evidence? Are they strong enough in terms of their quantity and quality to sustain the conclusions that you draw? Do the data or information you consider appropriately measure or relate to the theoretical concepts, or underlying social or physical phenomena, that you are interested in?

Findings

  • How do your findings fit with or contradict the rest of the literature in this field? How do you explain the differences of findings, or estimation, or interpretation between your work and that of other authors?

What next?

  • What are the main implications or lessons of your research for the future development of work in this specific sub-field? Are there any wider implications for other parts of the discipline? Do you have ‘next step’ or follow-on research projects in mind?

To put these ideas in a wider context, you might also find it helpful to read parts of my book: Patrick Dunleavy, ‘Authoring a PhD‘ (Palgrave, 2003), especially the chapter on ‘the endgame’ of finishing a doctorate. See also @Write4Research