Geography Teaching in Higher Education: Quality, assessment, and accountability

This paper address three questions: (1) What do we mean by 'high-quality' geography teaching in higher education? (2) How do we identify and evaluate it? and (3) To what extent are faculty and departments held accountable for the quality of their teaching? For anyone interested in geographical education, these questions are obviously of fundamental importance and yet curiously they are rarely asked, at least in this direct form. The reason may be that although these questions sound disarmingly simple to pose, they are considerably harder to answer. In this paper we make our task still more difficult by adding a fourth question: How do the answers to these questions vary between the UK and the USA? We provide an admittedly limited international synthesis by comparing and contrasting our interpretations from the UK and the USA. The paper closes by highlighting a series of issues that could form part of a continuing agenda for further, more detailed, comparative work in this area.

Keywords:

• Teaching
• Assessment
• Accountability
• Quality