Sometimes you slog along, day after day, week after week, just blindly "getting it done." And then once in a while, there's a convergence of opportunities to think and reflect.
This week has been one such collection of opportunities. On Monday, I attended a more-or-less mandatory workshop on student assessment at my workplace, and then the rest of the week I've been attending our annual geography conference in Boston.
The workshop left me thinking that I don't work nearly hard enough at identifying what my students SHOULD know, and WHY, and then figuring out ways to have them show me that, and be assessed as to their success. The workshop also raised the usual questions of "what is important to know in a geographical education" and "how can we make sure students possess that knowledge." I have a feeling that such a conversation would be quite contentious in our department as well as in my home (grad school) department.
Ah, geography...the discipline with no clear sense of itself. (Like landscape architecture, which I to some extent got out of for that very reason, and urban planning, which has no clear set of ideological precepts on which to build a body of work.) Why am I attracted to disciplines with identity crises?? It is NOT a recipe for career success!!
At the conference, I've had the chance to reflect more strategically on my future plans. I am interested in the intellectual frameworks of tourism geography, but I see myself shifting more into economic geography. I am particularly interested in regional science (or what is left of it these days), particularly as it intersects with newer cultural ideas in geography.
I am also interested in sustainable development, but it's such an emerging field that it will be difficult to pin it down and get a real research focus. It's probably the most important thing I can do, though.
I am always interested in heritage and history and preservation.
If you try to look for trends in AAG program books, it's really hard to do year by year. But this year I was more struck by quirky takes on issues: everyone's looking for novelty. Is that an artifact of the conference format, or a reflection of our interdisciplinary nature? Cynically, I'd guess the former.
Posted by otto0114 at April 18, 2008 08:45 PM