Student and faculty transformations from teaching wicked geography problems: a journey of transdisciplinary teaching between business and geography

ABSTRACT

In this paper, the dissolution of the silos between geography and business faculty to form a teaching partnership with a common set of questions and goals and how that partnership changed their academic perspectives will be explored. Faculty deepened the challenges for students, re-thought pedagogical models, and re-thought grading and evaluation. Business provides a wide range of messy or “wicked” problems where many decisions are unclear or uncertain for the actors. Quantitative methods and GIS help in their own way and often leave different aspects of uncertainty on the table for students. Integrating geography and business in teaching and student research, and exploring some of the early “academic territoriality” that gave way to build experiences for students is discussed. This evolution of teaching methods within the partnership moved to a more problem-based approach that evolved to affect courses outside the partnership. These changes eventually led the faculty to develop Course-embedded Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) to pose messy, unstructured projects to students. Many of these projects resulted in external student conference presentations. Another outcome was a re-framing of grading and development of assessment that focuses on students engaging in the work. Finally, we identify the artificiality of our disciplinary divisions.

KEYWORDS:

• Undergraduate research
• transdisciplinary
• business geography
• faculty development
• interdisciplinary
• grading

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.