The Classroom Beyond the Classroom
Over the 2016-17 academic year, I participated in the Lecturer Teaching Fellows Program at UC Berkeley, where I worked on developing teaching methods to encourage student engagement by fostering a geographical sensibility. Mapping and field observation are major elements of pedagogy in geography, but many of the small assignments we use to evaluate student learning don't always draw on these strengths. Reading response papers often treat texts in isolation, and we in turn treat them in isolation when it comes to providing feedback. Meanwhile, sharing images and places from daily life is an increasingly intuitive part of student experience, and many instructors have begun bringing social media like Twitter and Instagram into the classroom.
My goal in this project was to find a suitable platform for students to share geotagged images that are relevant to course materials, and develop pilot assignments that instructors in geography and beyond could use to facilitate student engagement through this activity. The urban field course I teach in the spring semester was a good opportunity to test the idea, since it has low enrollment and the activity would be topically relevant. For the platform, I decided on History Pin, a community history platform with a map-based display that supports multimedia uploads and embedded links. I assigned weekly "pins" - akin to miniature blog posts - to my 17 students. I left the topics purposefully open, but my directions to them stressed that the goal was for them to "see" course concepts in urban space around them outside of class.
By the end of the semester, our group had amassed 139 posts from cities ranging from Berkeley and San Francisco to Fairfield and San Leandro, and depicting everything from Oakland's historic Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center to the "weave of small patterns" evident in the clustering of mid-century tract housing in San Francisco's Sunset District. As one student put it in an anonymous poll evaluating the project: "[It] put me into a constantly analytical perspective when out in the world. In other words, pretty much everything (landmark, mundane object, house, building, etc.) I saw when I was out walking or driving, garnered the internal musing of, 'How could I do a history pin on that?'"
Please visit my project website for more information!
My goal in this project was to find a suitable platform for students to share geotagged images that are relevant to course materials, and develop pilot assignments that instructors in geography and beyond could use to facilitate student engagement through this activity. The urban field course I teach in the spring semester was a good opportunity to test the idea, since it has low enrollment and the activity would be topically relevant. For the platform, I decided on History Pin, a community history platform with a map-based display that supports multimedia uploads and embedded links. I assigned weekly "pins" - akin to miniature blog posts - to my 17 students. I left the topics purposefully open, but my directions to them stressed that the goal was for them to "see" course concepts in urban space around them outside of class.
By the end of the semester, our group had amassed 139 posts from cities ranging from Berkeley and San Francisco to Fairfield and San Leandro, and depicting everything from Oakland's historic Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center to the "weave of small patterns" evident in the clustering of mid-century tract housing in San Francisco's Sunset District. As one student put it in an anonymous poll evaluating the project: "[It] put me into a constantly analytical perspective when out in the world. In other words, pretty much everything (landmark, mundane object, house, building, etc.) I saw when I was out walking or driving, garnered the internal musing of, 'How could I do a history pin on that?'"
Please visit my project website for more information!
