I teach courses ranging from introductory undergraduate courses to advanced graduate seminars. I enjoy teaching and engaging with all sorts of students. I strongly believe that college level instruction is quite different from that which a student receives in high school. I regard my duty as being to inform and guide the student's own learning. This approach places the responsibility on both the professor and the student. I encourage students to work hard and extend themselves. While I make certain students learn new material ("facts") in my courses, I also encourage (and expect) students to be self-consciously critical about what they are learning. I help students practice critical thinking and work with them to develop and sharpen their analytic skills. In these politically divided and divisive times, teaching about international affairs is especially challenging, but absolutely crucial. I have reflected on some of these issues in a paper co-authored with Mary Curran that appeared in the journal International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education.
Recently I have offered courses such as: GEO 260 Geography of Third World Development; GEO 455 Economic Geography; and GEO 542 Political Geography, for undergraduates. At the graduate level I often teach GEO 702 Concepts in Geography and I regularly teach GEO 713 Theories of Development and Anti-Development. Additional recent seminars have included courses on Globalization and on Economic Geography. I have taught the professional development course, Preparing Future Faculty, in the past as well. As part of the program offered by the Committee on Social Theory, I have participated in several team-taught multidisciplinary seminars.
I relish working with students at all stages who share my broad intellectual interests and I have advised undergraduates who have completed special topics majors, honors theses, and/or undergraduate research projects.
I have also served as advisor to several M.A. students:
- Jeff Popke, on the faculty at East Carolina University
- Ray Barrufalo
- Jayme Walenta, doing PhD at University of British Columbia
- Frank Filleback, doing PhD at Louisiana State University
- Jason Strange, doing PhD at University of California Berkeley, and won prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship
- Chris Metzo, visiting faculty at Gustavus Adolphus College, Minnesota
- Abby Foulds, doing PhD at UK
- Chris Blackden, doing PhD at UK
I enjoyed serving as advisor to the following students who have completed their doctoral degrees:
- Carl Dahlman, on the faculty at the University of Miami, Ohio
- Mary Curran, on the faculty at Eastern Connecticut State University
- John Hintz, on the faculty at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania
- Margo Kleinfeld, on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater
- Josh Lepawsky, on the faculty at Memorial University, Newfoundland, Canada
- Kyonghwan Park, on the faculty at Ehwa Women’s University, Rep. of Korea
- Matthew Kurtz, Research Fellow at the Open University, UK
Currently, I am the main advisor for the following MA and PhD students:
M.A.
- Stephanie Blessing
- Jessica Schmid
Ph.D.
- Vanessa Hudson
- Michael Pryce-Jones
- Maggie Walker
- Abby Foulds
- Chris Blackden
- Garrett Graddy
- Jackie Salmond
As part of my in-going interest in graduate education, I have recently joined the AAG’s EDGE (Enhancing Departments and Graduate Education) in Geography project. This is funded by the National Science Foundation and entails research into how graduate student mentoring, program assessment, and organizational development works in Geography with the aim of developing resources to support improvement in these areas. See
http://www.aag.org/EDGE/index.cfm for more information.
