Postgraduate Educational Practice in Australian Geography: Change and Stasis

Abstract

Within Australia most Departments of Geography have been merged with programmes in Environmental Studies or Earth Sciences, and have been cast as multidisciplinary contributors to the increasingly vocational concerns of universities. One outcome is that named Geography programmes for postgraduates are not growing in institutional prominence in Australian universities. In such a situation, relatively few new innovations in the training specifically of Geography postgraduates are underway, and innovative developments are more likely to be occurring in multidisciplinary, coursework-based master's programmes or in the short courses offered by universities' central schools of graduate studies.

Keywords:

• Postgraduate education
• Australia
• Geography

Acknowledgement

I acknowledge the many excellent suggestions and pieces of extra information generously provided by Janice Monk, in the writing of this paper.

Notes

¹ For links to programmes, see the website of the Institute of Australian Geographers https://www.iag.org.au/about-geography/links-to-geography-in-australian-universities/ (accessed September 2011).

² See http://arts.monash.edu.au/ges/sustainability/index.php; http://www.humgeog.mq.edu.au/; http://www.flinders.edu.au/science_engineering/environment/our-school/crs-prog/ (accessed September 2011).

³ These examples were selected from the websites of the Departments/Schools at the University of Adelaide (http://www.hss.adelaide.edu.au/socialsciences/postgraduate/ges.html), Macquarie University (http://www.humgeog.mq.edu.au/postgrad/), University of Melbourne (V), and University of Wollongong (http://www.uow.edu.au/science/eesc/phd/index.html) (accessed September 2011).

⁴ See, for example, programmes of the Learning Centre, University of Sydney on topics such as ‘Preparing a Thesis Proposal’ or ‘Writing a Literature Review’ (http://sydney.edu.au/stuserv/learning_centre/) (accessed September 2011).

⁵ The School also periodically offers workshops for supervisors of postgraduate students. See http://www.gradresearch.unimelb.edu.au/staff/supervisors/workshops.html#new (accessed September 2011).