Virtual Egalitarianism, Critical Pedagogy, and Geographic Education

Abstract

This article explores the implementation of critical pedagogic practices into a graduate level landscape seminar Web site. Critical pedagogy seeks to reconfigure student-teacher relationships and disrupt embedded power regimes within academia and society. Critical pedagogic practices create a dialogue amongst learners, where everyone has a stake in the learning process. By turning all students into instructors on the course Web site, a virtual community was created that allowed for theories and identities to be openly explored and contested. In the seminar, the inherent hierarchies of power between teacher-students were removed, allowing for the formation of a critical moral consciousness that permitted deep learning.

Key Words:

• critical pedagogy
• graduate education
• e-learning
• Blackboard
• graduate seminar

Chris Lukinbeal is an assistant professor of geography at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, USA. He is a cultural geographer with research and teaching interests in cinema and media geography, cultural-urban landscapes, geographic education, and applications of GIScience to cultural geographies.

Casey D. Allen is a Ph.D. candidate (ABD) at Arizona State University's School of Geographical Sciences in Tempe, Arizona, USA. Trained as a geographer and educator, he is using rock art as an interface to assess the deep learning of environmental processes by undergraduates. His research interests include biogeomorphology, geographic education, and humanistic geography.

Notes

1. The embedded power relations inherent in Blackboard run so deep that an instructor cannot permanently change the status of a student on their own Web site. The university's Blackboard administrator must change the students' status within a course.

2. http://www.geography.wisc.edu/∼yifutuan/archive.htm

3. Some students have told me that I look like Tony Danza.