Disaster drills as experiential learning opportunities for geographic education

ABSTRACT

Student participation in municipal disaster drills can enhance geographic skill sets as well as build community resilience to local hazards. In these drills, students often assume the role of victims to help test local emergency response services. Teaching in an interdisciplinary department, we incorporate these field-based learning opportunities into undergraduate courses that draw heavily on geographic concepts yet reside outside of traditional geographic departments. Given that students enrolled in these courses possess varied backgrounds in geography, we incorporate basic geographic literacy into our course designs and found that municipal disaster drills serve as an impactful field-based learning experience. Though pedagogical observations of students’ understanding of geographic concepts prior to, during, and following disaster drills, we critically examine how this experiential learning activity can enhance students’ understanding of human–environment interaction, political geography, and cultural geography.

KEYWORDS:

• Disaster preparedness
• experiential learning theory
• hazard mitigation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.