The Geography Faculty Development Alliance: Workshops and Seminars to Improve the Teaching and Learning of Geography in Higher Education

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Geography (88)This is a 5-year project of workshops and seminars supporting a long-term, broad-based improvement in the learning and teaching of geography in higher education. This is being accomplished by providing junior faculty and advanced doctoral students with the theoretical and practical knowledge needed to excel in the lecture hall, seminar room, and laboratory. Participants are learning methods of active pedagogy, inquiry-based learning, teaching with technology, and topics often overlooked in today's graduate curriculum -- course planning, student assessment, discussion leadership, lecturing skills, field study, and evaluation methodologies. Key objectives of the project are to foster a culture of support and success for young faculty, to help them understand the fundamental interconnections between their teaching and research, and to advance the scholarship of teaching and learning across the entire discipline. To this end, the workshops are being led by some of geography's most accomplished scientists, scholars and teachers. These senior scientists, who also comprise the project's advisory board, are also assisting in establishing a mentoring network for participants in the project.To reach these goals, two workshops of one week duration are being held each summer for five years (2002-2006), with each workshop enrolling twenty participants. In addition, follow-up seminars, panel discussions, and paper sessions are being scheduled at the annual meetings of the Association of American Geographers and the National Council for Geographic Education to broaden the impact of the project, both to other faculty and institutions, and to K-12 teachers. A longitudinal evaluation/research component is assessing the value of this training to young faculty, particularly during the tenure review process. A final component involves publishing the workshop materials as a stand-alone course for use in graduate geography programs.