Challenging Assumptions: Teaching, Documenting, Producing and Negotiating ‘Health’

Abstract

As ‘health’ climbs academic, policy, commercial, non-profit and societal agendas, it has become increasingly subject to scrutiny by geographers. Yet, while health geographers may explore the discursive production, operationalization, deployment and management of health; the role of pedagogical practices has been repeatedly overlooked despite the clear intersections between the discipline's ongoing debate over its criticality and critical pedagogical aspirations. This paper explores this omission and its significance for teaching health geography by drawing upon the example and experience of two exercises undertaken with Masters students in a new health geography module—concept mapping and a simple definition exercise.

Keywords:

• UK Higher Education
• pedagogy
• health
• concept mapping
• critical geography
• teaching and learning

Acknowledgements

The authors thanks the MA Cities students of 2007–2009 for all their patience and enthusiasm during this task. I also thank three anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticism.

Notes

¹ Note that while I may use health and medical geography interchangeably in this paper, there is a long and detailed debate that seeks to distinguish and sets apart a ‘post-medical’ health geography from its more quantitatively informed medical geography counterpart (Kearns & Moon, 2002). This paper is not concerned with the details of this debate, which have been impressively considered elsewhere, it acknowledges that while there are some distinctions between the two fields, there is also sufficient conceptual slippage to justify using health/medical geography to signify the broader sub-discipline.

² Please note that students were made aware of the purpose of both these exercises—to try and enhance and encourage their own critical reflection on the relationships and inter-linkages of the three key terms forming the core of the course as well as to provide me with potential evidence of this to use as the basis of my own TLC critical portfolio compilation and to provide a feedback on student understanding that might be fed back into course redesign. All students in 2008 and 2009 gave written consent to having their work reproduced in this paper.

³ Given space constraints, all the concept maps cannot be reproduced in full and so just a small selection are drawn on for these discussions before turning to a broader discussion of the utility and limitation of this method.