The JGHE@40 Symposium: Introduction

At the tail end of its fortieth year, the Journal of Geography in Higher Education hosted a celebratory event at the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers. For many years, the reading rooms of the RGS-IBG had accommodated editorial board meetings of the journal, a ritual of exchanging annotated manuscripts among team members in a bygone age before email. It seemed fitting to return to Kensington Gore for the JGHE@40 event

The symposium is drawn from a number of papers presented during the celebration, some concerned with contemporary challenges and some considering the longer-term development of pedagogy within the discipline of geography. Pauline Kneale closed the event with a keynote address focusing on the emerging demands and challenges on staff in a REF-TEF World. TEF (Teaching Excellence Framework) in the UK is a new institution-wide evaluation of teaching excellence based on published metrics and an institutional statement, which joins the longer established REF (Research Excellence Framework). Whether the stress for academic staff to demonstrate excellence in both research and teaching will drive forward pedagogic innovation or a retreat to ‘safe’ lecture-led teaching styles is a source of contention. Kneale explores what this means for engaging students who have grown up in an online and social media environment. An appropriately challenging curricula for geography students might emphasise opportunities for co-creation and skills and confidence to tackle wicked problems, “characterised by changing circumstances, incomplete data, contradictory requirements and unknown elements.”

Derek France and Martin Haigh analyse the progression of scholarly research on fieldwork, often considered the signature pedagogy in geography. Looking back at 40 years of JGHE articles, they propose an evolution of geography from the 1950s, classified into seven predominant modes. These are teacher-centred; field as laboratory; project-orientated; curriculum-centred, technology-enhanced; research apprenticeship; and international reflective fieldwork. The increase in the frequency of fieldwork-related articles in the journal illustrates the relocation of fieldwork from the margins to the centre of the curriculum.

The seventh mode of fieldwork pedagogy noted above (international reflective fieldwork) is picked up in the next article by Alan Marvell and David Simm. Arguing that the benefits of international fieldwork are well established, Marvell and Simm contest that the affective and emotional aspects are less considered. Based on a fieldtrip to Barcelona, the difference between students’ in-situ emotions and the more refined reflections prepared after the fieldtrip is noted. They argue reflective diaries and essays do not always capture the range of emotional experiences and traditional assessment focuses on knowledge and processes of place-making rather than on a series of dynamic feelings.

On the opposite end of the fieldwork spectrum, Julie Peacock, Ruth Mewis and Deirdre Rooney consider the delivery of authentic experience through campus-based fieldwork. Given the financial costs of residential fieldtrips to departments and their students and the logistic difficulties for some students with caring or employment commitments, bite-sized fieldwork experience in the regular timetable is a viable alternative. The authors evaluate the reactions of students, which indicate this mode of field-based delivery could be used to substitute partially or prepare students for more intensive fieldwork experiences.

Joe Thorogood and colleagues describe a Changemakers initiative. Changemakers is a university-funded opportunity for students (or staff in partnership with students) to design, refine, implement and evaluate a change they would like to see in their department. In this case, the initiative is a student-led departmental conference. Besides emphasising student-led research, the organisation of events like the conference provides an array of opportunities for development of soft skills and enhancement of employability.

The final paper in the symposium was triggered by a question and answer session in the Past Editors’ Panel at the JGHE@40 event. Geographers seem to be good or skilled at pedagogic research. What is about the modes of geographical research that allow geographers to undertake learning research? The panel’s musings on the bandwidth of geography, a discipline which is not really a discipline, the necessity of teaching outside one’s specialist area, the role of the RGS-IBG in creating a coherency and identity for a diverse range of specialisms, prompted Jenny Hill, Helen Walkington and Helen King to question the proclivity of geographers towards the scholarship of teaching and learning.

The panel discussion with former editors was arranged as a centrepiece of the JGHE@40 event. From the founding editor, Alan Jenkins, the panel spanned the forty years of existence of JGHE. In chronological order, the editors present included Alan Jenkins, David Unwin, Ifan Shepherd, Mick Healey, Martin Haigh, as well as three contemporary editors, David Higgitt, Derek France and Bob Bednarz. Iain Hay provided some written comments. Naturally, the panel discussion began with some reflections on how the journal originated and evolved. As Alan Jenkins comments with understated relish, “David Pepper and I had a five minute conversation once, about creating JGHE. Since then a lot of work has been done by a lot of people. It’s a collective.”

Referring to “typical Oxford conversations”, Jenkins continues, “I was in my jazz club one night and this bloke said to me ‘Alan, Kierkegaard said you live your life forward and understand it backwards’. I would like to say something about JGHE in that sense. JGHE started at a time when there was no specialist group on learning and teaching in the Institute for British Geographers. There was nothing there.”

Indeed the lead editorial in the first issue of the journal includes a quotation from Stan Gregory’s Presidential Address to the Institute of British Geographers in 1976 deploring the limited attention to what we teach and how we teach it, despite teaching conditioning the health of the discipline. The specific context for the formation of the journal came from a national conference on teaching geography in 1975, for which David Pepper and Alan Jenkins were responsible for editing the conference proceedings. In contemplating how to sustain interest on teaching matters in between successive conferences, the idea of a newsletter was considered but ditched in favour of a journal. As Alan Jenkins, puts it, “The Journal was started by people from the Polytechnic sector, that strange group, who wanted to know how to get their courses accredited.”

In the UK, many polytechnics were founded in the late 1960s and early 1970s, though several trace their history back through earlier institutions. The Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA) was founded in 1965, following recommendation from the so-called Robbins Committee. This gave colleges more flexibility to devise and develop degree courses to be approved by the Council, rather than relying on existing universities to accredit degrees. The rationale for some initiative to improve the flow of information about teaching and learning within a disciplinary context was apparent. The journal webpage contains the often repeated slogan from the first editorial that the Journal of Geography in Higher Education is founded on the conviction that the importance of teaching has been undervalued in geographical higher education. The growth and development of the journal over 40 years is testament to the sustained relevance of a platform for communicating and sharing good practice within an academic discipline, the realisation of the conviction that geography teachers of diverse research specialisms need a forum to discuss common teaching interests. Oxford Polytechnic (Oxford Brookes University since 1992) has played a central role in the journal since its inception. In an earlier reflection, Jenkins (1997) noted that the institution supported the proposal to start a journal by providing a grant of 50 GBP. Far more importantly, the assistance of Tom Culverson and Keith Vaughan of Oxford Polytechnic Press, enabled the home-produced journal to commence circulation in 1977. At that time, of course, no commercial publisher would sense viability in a discipline-based journal focussed on teaching and learning, but remarkably it was only four years before Carfax came calling. The journal’s swirling logo dates back from Volume 5.

A reading of Kierkegaard may suggest that a speculative decision to test the demand for geography practitioners to share concerns about teaching, led to a series of transformations that can only be contemplated with hindsight. Kierkegaard also knew a thing or two about anxiety, the “dizzying effect of freedom” gazing into the yawning chasm of possibilities where each path chosen is another path denied (Kierkegaard, 1844). Martin Haigh, who took over editorial reigns from 2003 (also keeping the Oxford Brookes flag flying) describes “it was like being handed a very large cut glass vase. I was more worried about breaking it. That was the area of concern, how to keep the standard up. For a while it was a bit of a battle.” For the later generation of custodians looking back at the early editions of the journal there is something to suggest that the rawness and energy of the exchanges has been traded for more conventional scholarship and high production values. Some of the excitement of the early initiatives and shared sense of pioneering left behind as particular paths were selected. The energy of the early days of the journal is evident in the recollections of past editors on the panel.

David Unwin describes meeting Alan Jenkins in Aberystwyth when both were colleagues for one year. “We got on quite well for a year and then I moved to Leicester. The next thing I knew I was trapped. I have to confess the journal changed my life. It really did. Like most people at the time, my work was very heavily research orientated and I had no formal instruction in learning and teaching. I was floundering. I was using the apprentice model and if you had been taught by Bill Mead or Henry Clifford Derby you did not stand a chance. The Journal changed my life. It created a tremendous amount of work, but I respect all the work I did. It’s one of the projects I am most proud of and it’s all due to Alan Jenkins.”

Ifan Shepherd, who can claim the record as a member of the editorial board for the entire lifetime of the journal, notes, “This has always been a revolutionary journal in the sense that it is has always been a participator collaborative collegiate enterprise from day one. Everyone mucked in. Every paper that came in was read by every member of the editorial board, but we did it, we didn’t know any better, we made it up as we went along.”

The original editorial board listed in the first issue of the journal has David Pepper and Alan Jenkins (both Oxford Polytechnic) as editors, David Cooper (Luton College of HE), John Gold and Peter Keene (both Oxford Polytechnic), Russel King and David Unwin (both Leicester), Ifan Shepherd (Middlesex), Frances Slater (London Institute of Education), Michael Storm (Inner London Education Authority) and David Walker (Loughborough). If the precept for encouraging debate about teaching styles related to accreditation of polytechnic courses, the impetus for the journal required a wider discussion across the higher education community. Established for disciplinary identity so that content would be “largely written geographers for geographers” (Jenkins, 1997), the presence of education researchers in the editorial board and the desire to link disciplinary concerns to broader fields of educational theory is evident from the beginning. Despite the concentration of the inaugural editorial board around a London-Midlands axis, an international dimension is also present from the outset. In an earlier commentary, Higgitt and France (2018) noted the ability of the editorial board to attract support and copy from many of the leading lights in the discipline.

Early encounters between the editorial board and superstars of the discipline are remembered fondly. Ifan Shepherd recalls, one of the first papers written by Ron Johnson. “When that draft came in, it was sent immediately to the editor-in-chief. The guy who knew how to edit. Alan was the inspiration and David Pepper knew how to edit. And David showed me the mock-up of the version he sent to Ron asking for amendments. When I looked at it, my heart was pumping, what had he done? I asked ‘you are not going to send that to Ron are you?’ David said ‘yes of course’ adding ‘you will be doing it soon’. Ron wrote back, bless his heart, ‘thank very much it’s just what someone like me needs’.”

On a similar theme, David Unwin recalls editing the submission from Peter Gould for the first issue. “I savaged it and I was quaking. I have immense respect for the late Peter Gould. He was an enormous influence on many people. He wrote cogently on pedagogic matters in geography. And an all-round super guy. So I was quaking in my shoes and he wrote back and said ‘you are a superb editor’. I wish I had kept that letter, because it was a professional recognising a professional in a collegiate system trying for the best product.”

Iain Hay, Commissioning Editor for Australasia was unable to join the celebration but provided some written comments for the occasion. On the sense of collegiality, he comments that “through an array of openhearted practices and procedures, this journal has always welcomed early-career and more seasoned scholars from around the world into its midst. This flows, in part, from the journal’s enviable history of attracting passionate, outgoing editors, keen to promote the journal’s interests in the development of learning and teaching.” Alan Jenkins adds, “That’s what we did with JGHE from the beginning – we did it collectively. We were probably the second international pedagogy journal in a discipline. We had to work out what an article that would help someone improve would look like. One thing we quickly found that everything was wonderful. Every article was about wonderful successful teaching. David Unwin had to work out how to write to help other people move on.”

Mick Healey remembers the board “came up with the idea that we write about things we do badly, the only person who ever contributed was David [Unwin].” And from the horse’s mouth, “the title of the article was ‘tutorials’ which I described as mini lectures of no conceivable educational value what so ever.” This (Unwin, 1985) is one a series of initiatives that the journal trialled in the early days. Another innovation was the dating service for sabbaticals (Geoexchange), circulated with hard copy of the journal from 1979 that attempted to arrange international swaps of faculty in a pre-Facebook era. “Arena” was an early feature which incorporated a number of short contributions around a topical issues. In the current era of citation statistics, large numbers of small articles on a theme are not conducive to optimising impact factor and is one of the paths the journal has cast-off. At one stage, each issue of the journal contained a commissioned editorial on a topical educational theme. This process was relaxed when the journal run extended to four issues per year and the procurement of timely copy became difficult to sustain. JGHE Oscar awards appeared in 1982. An interview with David Attenborough featured in 1984 (Burgess & Unwin, 1984). Ifan Shephered recalls the impact of a series of paper on the experience of first year faculty (Fink, 1983, 1984, 1985). In the second half of the journal’s existence, a biennial prize was introduced to showcase examples of pedagogic research in geography with the authors invited to reflect on the context and implications of their work. Commissioning editors for North America and Australasia had been added to spread the word and encourage more submissions from their regions. The JGHE Annual Lecture series was established, initially located at the RGS-IBG Annual Conference or the AAG Annual Conference. Judicious placements at IGU regional events and other organisations has enabled the event to break outside the Anglo-American axis, part of a conscious effort to internationalise. Even the International Association of Geomorphologists has hosted a JGHE Annual Lecture in Malaysia (Brierley, 2008).

If the rationale for the existence of JGHE was the isolation of debate about learning and teaching, the ensuing years have seen many generic and discipline-based initiatives raise the profile. Many of these initiatives have symbiotic relationships with the journal. In the UK, the Geography Discipline Network was established in 1994 with funding under the Enterprise in Higher Education initiative. The Learning and Teaching Subject Networks were established in 2000 with the network for Geography, Environmental and Earth Sciences (LTSN-GEES), directed by Brian Chalkley, a long-term member of the editorial board. The Subject Centre’s journal Planet launched the following year and continued until 2015, long after the funding for the subject centres had ceased. JGHE enjoyed a fruitful and productive partnership with LTSN-GEES. In March 1999, the International Network for Learning and Teaching in Geography (INLT) was launched at a symposium in Hawaii, USA. The INLT has hosted a number of writing workshops, often linked to regional IGU conferences, which not only help nurture the same community of practice but have sustained the journal’s publication output (Hay, 2008). Papers from INLT workshops are among the most highly cited JGHE articles. As Iain Hay notes, “The longstanding publisher, Taylor & Francis, has been loyal to the journal’s work, sponsoring conference sessions around the world, supporting peripatetic annual lectures, and even backing delightful social gatherings that are a vital glue holding together a community of practice.”

During the past 40 years there has been an enormous shift in the underlying technology shaping the world of publishing. The collectivism of the early editorial boards was necessary to discover the formula for a viable and useful discipline-based pedagogic journal. This process evolved into teams within the editorial board who looked at submissions alongside external reviewers. Consequently, it was not uncommon for an author to receive back comments from seven or eight reviewers. As Martin Haigh comments, “if you submit a 12 page paper and get 15 pages of revisions, it does not mean we do not like it. We are trying to help. If we did not like it, you would not get all that work.” The postage of double-spaced manuscripts slowly gave way to email and from 2008 the journal moved to an online manuscript handling system, Manuscript Central. Though many bemoan the lack of personalisation and frequency of automated messaging, the manuscript management system (now called ScholarOne) has enabled the everyday work of the editorial boards to disperse far wider in pursuit of internationalisation. While these systems enable the administrative editor to keep an overview on the progress of manuscripts through the stages of review there are new challenges, not least the difficulty to find willing conscripts to conduct peer review.

The editors’ panel was asked to give advice to early career geographers (those perhaps younger than the journal) wishing to make significant contributions to pedagogic research in geography. Given that this was a celebratory event, debates about the deflated value and recognition of pedagogic scholarship and teaching excellence in the promotion framework of universities were left to one side. Mick Healey advised reading Martin Haigh’s article about writing for the JGHE (Haigh, 2013) and recounts how this came about. “About 12 years ago, we had a session at the RGS and Martin had a paper he was going to present. Two hours before, I said ‘Why don’t we run off copies of the paper and turn it into a workshop by asking people to skim read the paper and actually assess it against the criteria for JGHE?’ It’s a great model. We eventually persuaded Martin to write it up as a paper.” Martin Haigh responds, “It is the most rejected paper in the history of JGHE. I think it was rejected 100 times, but it is still there. It was Mick’s idea to have the postmodern interactive workshop. The first time out at the front was painful.” Bob Bednarz adds, “Publishing is difficult. You work hard to produce a manuscript and when you think it is really good you send it somewhere then you get it back and find it is not so great after all and you have to make changes. It is humbling but something everyone faces. Some people think the review process is an aggressive contentious process, without realising that it is about getting the best article from that manuscript in print. Because if you can improve the author’s work it improves the quality if the journal: if the journal is better this is better for the author.”

The notion that geographers, in particular, have a penchant for pedagogic research is explored by Jenny Hill and co-authors in the symposium. As Martin Haigh comments, “My PhD was in measuring soil erosion on mining spoil tips. Then I find I am teaching the philosophy of geography or urban studies. To do this you are put in a position where you have to absorb knowledge and find a way to communicate unfamiliar topics in a diversity of ways. It is the nature of geography that teachers have to focus on pedagogic matters more than other disciplines.” The corollary is that the bandwidth expected from an early career geographer, especially in a small department, might push that individual towards scholarship of teaching and learning as a survival mechanism as much as a life choice.

Looking ahead, what changes might we expect to see in the next forty years? Mick Healey, surveying the assembled masses of male former editors has a clear answer: “the gender balance has to change.” He also advocates student involvement in the journal: “Students as partners. Many are writing about it, but we don’t have students on the editorial board.” For Ifan Shepherd the political challenges of the post-truth generation stand out. “We need to become public ambassadors of evidence-based research and have evidence of what works well and research that can stand up to scrutiny. Increasingly people are going to say we do not need experts, climate change deniers are being elevated to political power which is very worrying. But we are well positioned to educate young geographers who will carry the torch for evidence-based knowledge.” Martin Haigh notes the significance of the outputs from geography degrees: “What we are talking about in Geocapabilities. What does a geographer look like, what is a geographer capable of doing and how is a geographer contributing to the World?”

On a less optimistic note, the pressures of academic life in an increasingly metric-dominated environment may take a toll on the opportunities for geographers to divert quality time into pursuit of pedagogic scholarship. The traditional peer review process is already straining under demands on time. However, in keeping with the celebratory tone, the final words are from Iain Hay. “As its aims make clear, JGHE is committed to promoting, enhancing and sharing geography learning-and-teaching in all institutions of higher education throughout the world, providing a forum for scholars, regardless of their specialisms, to discuss common educational interests, to present educational research, and to advocate new ideas. Those aims are exactly the opportunities JGHE has embraced so productively and effectively in its first 40 years. I feel certain JGHE will continue to seize opportunities for high quality, inclusive, boundary-crossing work, and I restate my globalising hope that this journal’s future will see an even more diverse array of international scholars fall under its charms.”