Professional Development in Teaching and Learning for Early Career Academic Geographers: Contexts, Practices and Tensions

Abstract

This paper provides a review of the practices and tensions informing approaches to professional development for early career academic geographers who are teaching in higher education. We offer examples from Britain, Canada, Nigeria and the USA. The tensions include: institutional and departmental cultures; models that offer generic and discipline-specific approaches; the credibility of alternative settings for professional development in teaching and learning; the valuing of professional development and of teaching in academic systems of reward and recognition; and the challenges of balancing professional and personal life. We summarize concepts of good practice and suggest opportunities for future research.

Keywords:

• Early career geographers
• academic cultures
• preparation for teaching

Notes

¹ We recognize that terminology varies cross-nationally. In this paper, we have used North American terminology: ‘graduate’, rather than postgraduate and ‘faculty’ rather than ‘staff’.

² The Carnegie Classification as revised in 2005 includes over 30 categories of US institutions of higher education using criteria such as types of degrees offered, institutional size, orientation and location (Available at http://classifications.carnegiefoundation.org/descriptions/; accessed November 2010).

³ Nigerian institutions place value of interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary publication, for example, and the valuing of such work may be increasing in the USA, for example, as funding agencies foster multi-disciplinary research on complex environmental and societal problems.

⁴ In Nigeria, salaries in the public universities are uniform regardless of university status, discipline, gender and ethnicity; and private universities feel some pressure to follow these scales in order to retain faculty.

⁵ The publications and conferences of the American Association of Universities and Colleges which focus on undergraduate education and address such themes as global education and diversity issues offer resources of value to geographers (Available at http://www.aacu.org; accessed 10 June 2010).