Practicing Diversity in Higher Education in Geography: Exploring Spaces of Diversity and Their Barriers in a Geography Department in Switzerland

Abstract

Recent feminist geographic scholarship has urged geographers to distance themselves from androcentric and Eurocentric approaches, and to open up the discipline to diverse perspectives. Whereas numerous studies have focused on diversifying and decolonizing geography through recruitment practices, mentoring, and knowledge production, only a few have analyzed how diversity translates into teaching practices, particularly in contexts where diversity is relatively well-established among staff. Based on a questionnaire survey among the teaching staff, a content analysis of course syllabi, and a quantitative analysis of the department’s employee data, this article explores to what extent diversity within the department leads to diversity in teaching practices. By developing a framework of spaces of diversity, we analyze three spaces that potentially enable practicing diversity in teaching: The department’s academic space promotes free choice of research and teaching topics and flexible working conditions; the department space enables individuals to engage in shaping geographical teaching; and the knowledge space promotes diversity as an ideal. We found, however, that practicing diversity in geography is challenged through traditional and neoliberal university structures and formal and perceived hierarchies. Moreover, there is a need for concrete diversity practices on individual and institutional levels to actively bring diverse perspectives into the classroom.

女权地理学的最新研究, 敦促地理学者远离以男性和欧洲为核心的方法, 接受不同的观点。许多研究都侧重通过招聘、指导和知识生产, 去实现地理学的多样化和去殖民化。只有少数研究分析了多样性如何转化为教学实践（尤其是在教职员工多样性相对稳定的情况下）。基于教师问卷调查、课程大纲内容分析以及对地理系员工数据的定量分析, 本文探讨了地理系的多样性在多大程度上导致教学实践的多样性。我们建立了一个多样性的空间框架, 分析了可能实现教学多样性的三个空间：“学术空间”促进对研究课题、课程题目和灵活工作条件的自由选择, “地理系空间”使个人能够参与地理教学的建设, “知识空间”促进理想的多样性。然而, 传统的和新自由主义的大学体系以及严格的等级制度, 是实现地理多样性的挑战。此外, 还需要在个人和体制层面采取切实的多样性实践, 积极地将不同观点带入课堂。

La reciente erudición geográfica feminista ha urgido a los geógrafos a distanciarse de los enfoques androcéntricos y eurocéntricos, y a abrir la disciplina a perspectivas diversas. En tanto que numerosos estudios se han enfocado a diversificar y descolonizar la geografía por medio de prácticas de reclutamiento, tutoría y producción de conocimiento, solo muy pocos han analizado cómo se traduce la diversidad en las prácticas de enseñanza, en particular en contextos donde la diversidad está relativamente bien establecida entre el personal. Basado en una encuesta por cuestionario entre el personal docente, en un análisis del contenido de los programas de los cursos y un análisis cuantitativo de los datos de los empleados del departamento, este artículo explora hasta qué punto la diversidad dentro del departamento conduce a la diversidad en las prácticas de la enseñanza. Desarrollando un marco de los espacios de la diversidad, analizamos tres espacios que potencialmente permiten practicar la diversidad en la enseñanza: El espacio académico del departamento promueve la libre elección de los tópicos de investigación y enseñanza, y las condiciones flexibles del trabajo; el espacio del departamento permite a los individuos asumir compromisos en la configuración de la enseñanza geográfica; y el espacio del conocimiento promueve la diversidad como un ideal. Sin embargo, encontramos que practicar la diversidad en geografía implica enfrentar los retos de las estructuras universitarias tradicionales y neoliberales y de las jerarquías formales y percibidas. Aún más, existe una necesidad de prácticas concretas sobre diversidad a niveles individuales e institucionales para llevar activamente las diversas perspectivas al salón de clase.

Key Words:

• diversity in higher education
• geography departments
• questionnaire survey
• Switzerland
• teaching practices

关键词:

• 高等教育多样性
• 地理系
• 问卷调查
• 瑞士
• 教学实践。

Palabras clave:

• departamentos de geografía
• diversidad en la educación superior
• encuesta por cuestionario
• prácticas docentes
• Suiza

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Acknowledgments

We would first of all like to thank our colleagues who shared their experiences with us. We are especially grateful to Doris Wastl-Walter, Heike Mayer, and Elisabeth Militz, whose insights on earlier versions of this article helped develop our argument, and reflect on the questions from different viewpoints. Thank you also to the Institute Board at GIUB for their openness, and for discussing and acknowledging the value of this study. Thanks also to the editor and reviewers for their thought-provoking and constructive comments.

Notes

1 This abbreviation refers to the German designation: Geographisches Institut der Universität Bern.

2 Qualitative research principles call for open-ended questions above all because they have greater potential to enable the respondents to communicate their own experiences and practices (Silverman 2010). COVID-19, however, led to challenges such as home offices, additional workload through the care of entrusted persons, and time bottlenecks among many colleagues (Corbera et al. 2020).

3 To generalize our study in a wider national context, we sought to conduct a quantitative analysis of the employee data at GIUB as well as other geography departments in Switzerland, provided by the institutes on request. We asked all six geography departments in Switzerland (Geneva, Lausanne, Neuchatel, Zurich, Basel, Bern) to provide an overview of the nationality and gender of their employees. Only one department delivered the required data, however: In Switzerland, data protection generally prohibits sharing information about the origin, nationality, and even gender of individual departments’ employees. In most European countries, documenting citizens’ race and ethnicity is generally rare compared, for example, to North America (Burton, Nandi, and Platt 2010; Simon and Piché 2012; Simon 2017), mostly due to data protection regulations.

4 We complemented the questionnaire data by analyzing nineteen mandatory courses (2020) our students attend during the first six semesters of their undergraduate studies. The obligatory literature the respondents used (n = 68) consisted of forty-one men, twenty-one women (eighteen in human geography), and four a mix of both. Men generally referred to male authors in their courses (except for in two cases where women were coauthors), whereas all women cited at least one female author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maaret Jokela-Pansini

MAARET JOKELA-PANSINI is a Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QY, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. She is interested in participatory methods and people’s embodied experiences with (ill) health, environmental pollution, and marginalization, as well as in the ways that questions of social inequality and diversity are promoted in academic spaces.

Jeannine Wintzer

JEANNINE WINTZER is a Lecturer for Qualitative Methods in the Department of Geography at the University of Bern, Bern 3012, Switzerland. E-mail: [email protected]. She works on the history, theories, and methods of geography, and is committed to reflecting on university teaching after the Bologna reform and COVID-19.