Beginning your first assessment in university human geography can be daunting. But here is a step-by-step guide to getting started.
University skills: Doing your first geography assessment
WTF is the teaching-research nexus? Or, how my teaching load supports my research
Yesterday I was giving a short talk to a group of early career researchers doing a two day workshop. I have good memories of doing the same workshop when I first began at my current workplace. I remember folks coming in and speaking to us and how actually, a couple of ideas I got from... Continue Reading →
Share this:
Check list process for university course planning and design
It's the first lecture, and the bright or bleary eyed students will be turning up to hear what is in for them for the semester. But the work started long before. And I don't mean lecture preparation. Lecture preparation is one of the last things that happen in my course design process. Here is my... Continue Reading →
Share this:
Beyond public intellectualism: moving from ‘matters of fact’ to ‘matters of concern’ in research
Last week I posted on being a public intellectual, or someone who engages with communities and society outside of academia, communicating research directly and also being influenced by communities in choosing research topics. I stand by all that. But I want to think further about the more theoretical work that community-engaged, public intellectual researchers do,... Continue Reading →
Share this:
What I learned about emailing students… from my two-year-old.
I recently posted about writing emails to lecturers in New Zealand universities. I made some suggestions for appropriate email etiquette in NZ based on deconstructing a few representative emails and my own personal preferences. The flipside of the story is of course lecturers who email students in anger, frustration, annoyance and with little sensitivity to... Continue Reading →
Share this:
You Won’t Believe How These New Zealand Undergraduates Email Their Lecturers
My tongue-in-cheek clickbait title is meant to illustrate via awkward engagement how inappropriate the norms of social media are to academia. Nowhere is this more obvious than when students try to email me. Here's a recent example* I reproduce in full: Hi I missed my second lab and I think the Cencus data for completely assignment... Continue Reading →
Share this:
Update: Getting Kids to Do Stuff
So most of you have probably worked this out well before me, but once your kids can read LISTS ARE AWESOME. My blogposts this time last year were about the emotional labour of managing a family and resentment at having to make sure everything that needed to be done got done. And the nagging. I... Continue Reading →
Share this:
Writing First Year Geography Lectures
I've been very quiet in the blogosphere recently. Mostly because I have been preparing new lectures for a section of a first year course I am teaching. I taught first year almost exclusively in my first academic job at Macquarie University, and since I was starting at scratch with topics I had never lectured on... Continue Reading →
Share this:
Holiday Homeschooling
In a previous post about the parallels between education and maternity care I argued that although public health and public education are extremely important for equity reasons, informed homebirthing and homeschooling are probably the gold standard for maternity care and education respectively. After reading an article on 'short-term homeschooling' I wondered about short-term homeschooling for... Continue Reading →
Throwntogetherness 