Development
The project was funded for the 2005-2006 academic year. Three junior and senior level courses with different thematic content were chosen as vehicles for this project. At the U of A the selected course was Cultural Geography emphasizing social justice and border issues. U.S. Geography, focusing on landscape, was the chosen course at NAU; and a senior level special topics course, Cinematic Geographies, was created at ASU.
Fall semester, principal investigators and their TA’s
Implementation
Courses were taught Spring semester 2006. Each PI dealt with the courses’ thematic content differently yet material shared by all three courses was relevant to each theme and the emphasis on media. During the first week of class, students wrote a short essay about their experience with and exposure to media in their daily lives. They also watched three clips from documentaries (1, 2, 3) dealing with aspects of nature-society relationships and completed a series of questions about those clips. By the end of the second week students had divided into groups and chosen the topic for their semester-long short documentary or photo-essay projects. Mid-term each class watched the film Smoke Signals and students were asked to interpret the film in relationship to space, place, affect, and culture. A student conference was held at NAU the final weekend in April. This conference provided a professional venue wherein students from the three courses could co-mingle and present and discuss their work. It was also a forum for peer evaluation of the projects, and, evaluation of the project as a whole by the Principal Investigators. The final week students again watched the three documentary clips (1, 2, 3) and answered the same questions. They also completed open-ended, self-reflexive questions that will be compared to their first essay about media in their daily lives.
Grades were based primarily on student projects, class participation, and peer evaluations. The initial essay, pre-and post course assessment matrices of the three video clips, and self-reflexive questions were not graded as they are to be used for assessing the effectiveness of the project.
Results
Although there was variability, students at all three universities produced thoughtful, creative, quality projects. They appreciated the opportunity to present their work to a wider audience than just their own professor and classmates and found that attending the conference helped them to better place their class experience within the full context of the project. Their projects and self-reflexive essays showed a heightened critical understanding of media and skill in using visual media as a means of presenting geographic concepts and processes.
The assessment matrices and essays are currently being analyzed and a journal article on the project and one related to the film ‘Smoke Signals’ are underway. Two sessions discussing project results and showing selected student projects have been organized for the upcoming Association of Pacific Coast Geographers’ meeting in Eugene, Oregon September 2006. The three PI’s and some students will present.
The PIs found the development of integrated courses both challenging and rewarding. We consider this learner-centered education project to be a success and will use many of the concepts and exercises in our future course development. We also expect experience to help build the foundation for future collaborations between the participating departments and potentially other departments and act as a springboard for interdisciplinary initiatives within and across the three universities.
