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Recruiting undergraduate students is a significant challenge for undergraduate geography programs. Few students have robust exposure to geography in secondary school and the major has low name recognition for entering first year students. In fact, geography is often a "found" major on many campuses with students coming to the major after a general education course. But, does it need to be this way? Can geography programs take a more proactive role in building a pipeline of prospective students that is not solely tied to supporting AP Human geography teachers? In this paper, we describe an alternative path for university departments to build strong recruiting pathways, sharing the successes and challenges of building the connections and the learning advantages that students gain through early exposure to geospatial technologies. We focus on the Geospatial Semester, a dual enrollment program between James Madison University and participating school districts in Virginia (and beyond) that began in 2005. We share how departments can build a successful partnership with high schools and the process of sustaining such a program within a university setting. We will also describe the research we have done on the learning gains the Geospatial Semester provides to participating students and how extended use of geospatial technology bolters students' spatial thinking skills.

Sports mega-events offer rich and varied opportunities for educating students on key concepts defining geographical ways of thinking. Concept-learning, central to students' development, can be enhanced by issue-based enquiries that enable them to personalise and apply concepts in meaningful and memorable ways. A diverse range of activities constituting sports mega-events increases likelihood of stimulating interest among students, including those non-active in sport. This paper provides a pedagogic example to demonstrate how geography students can critically engage with their own sport interests to explore the threshold concept of place. It does so through the example of the Tour de France, a professional road cycling race. Three vignettes are presented to interweave theory and empirics, demonstrating how they might be explored using different understandings of place. The first vignette concerns mapping the Tour in relation to space and time, the second to materialities and a sense of place of a finishing line, and the third to a relational politics of place through the inclusion of Plymouth in the 1974 race. Further explorations of place are suggested through themes such as fixity, connectivity, mobility, and temporality, alongside suggestions for class discussion and deeper reflection among students. The pedagogic example provides a template applicable to other sports events.

In times of the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers on all levels have had to adapt to an online or hybrid teaching environment. People in geography, a discipline that traditionally values field trips to connect theory to practice, have had to find online alternatives for educational activities that normally would have taken place in the field. This has led to several innovative practices, which, however, have only to a limited degree been purposively tested for efficacy because of the ad-hoc, enforced nature of the required changes. This project deals with this issue by studying, through student workshops dealing with the creation of online didactic walking routes in two cities, how students can obtain specific geographical competences such as interpreting different historical layers that collectively shape the current urban fabric through online cartography. We found that students reported clear improvements in geographical reasoning skills, regarding both GIS and heritage interpretation. There were no clear patterns regarding the role of familiarity with the studied city for the quality of the produced story maps. On final reflection, we argue that online cartographic exercises are a valuable addition to the geographers' educational toolkit to bounce forward to a more resilient, reflective educational practice after the pandemic.

Sport, in particular football, can provide a useful means through which to explore the related issues of migration and national identity. Sports stars migrate from one country to another often mirroring patterns of more widespread migration from periphery to core. Such movements are influenced by a range of factors. In an increasingly commercialised and globalised sport, the exploration of footballers' roots and the routes they take feeds into a consideration of issues of place identity and belonging. In international sporting competition, competitors don the national colours, sing the anthem and "fly the flag", and in doing so become the embodiment of the wider imagined community. Traditionally those who compete for countries have usually been born and raised there or have lived there for sizeable periods of their lives. In recent years, however, the selection by international sports teams of competitors born in other countries has become increasingly common. The use of these footballing examples provides insights into migration, diaspora, citizenship, globalisation, and the multi-layered and contingent nature of national identity. Sport can offer a useful means of illuminating these various geographic themes and socio-spatial processes, thereby rendering them more accessible and interesting to students.

This paper presents a review of the literature on the use of commercially available city building games (CBGs), such as SimCity and Cities: Skylines, as learning tools in classroom instruction. Given the ubiquity and popularity of digital games, particularly among young people, instructors in a variety of fields and at various academic levels have begun to consider using these media to motivate and advance student learning. CBGs challenge students to design and build economically viable virtual cities; a task expected to promote systems and critical thinking, as well as the acquisition and use of knowledge regarding urban geography, politics, and planning. Overall, the findings thus far are primarily positive, and suggest that commercial CBGs can be used to address a variety of learning objectives. For geography in particular, CBGs have demonstrated potential in helping students understand and apply geographic concepts, as well as develop spatial reasoning and creativity. In the concluding sections I propose an agenda for future work examining the role and effectiveness of CBGs in pedagogy, and provide a set of recommendations for instructors looking to use CBGs in the classroom.

This paper is based on an experiment conducted in 2019 at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, as part of a post-graduate research course, that aimed to reflect on the methodologies used by geographers when (re)searching (for) emotions. This methodological question is crucial since it is partly because of the difficulty of finding relevant tools to study emotions that geographers -- especially in France -- have tended to neglect them, both in their research and their teaching activities. To address this, a series of workshops were organized in which geographers and artists were invited to present, test and discuss with participants a methodology they had conceived to apprehend, explore or transcribe emotions. Various artistic media (film, poetry, literature, dance, theatre) were used to explore participants' emotional relations to space. These arts-based research practice workshops were therefore not only a means of teaching about emotions but also a place and a time during which the participants collectively developed spatial practices and knowledge about emotions. By critically analysing this experiment, we will question both its potentialities and its limits in building shared geographical understanding on emotions. In so doing, we seek to show that emotions are a legitimate source of knowledge and teaching in geography.

Learning by doing has become a common phrase in the scholarship of teaching and learning as research continues to emphasize the benefits of active student engagement in higher education. Instead of passive vessels to be filled with information, students become the architects of their own education. While traditional ways of teaching focus on what students should learn, there is now more interest in "how" they should learn. With the emotional turn in geography, research has increasingly focused on the lived experience and the emotional and affective dimensions of space and place. However, the question often remains as to how to bring such research into an active learning environment that extends beyond the classroom. Instead of learning by doing, learning by "feeling" is presented as a new way of teaching emotional geographies. Student projects from two courses in landscape geography reveal how excursions into the affective landscape help students explore emotional geographies through more creative, reflective, affective, and active learning assessment strategies.

Maps have been used for centuries to depict the diverse facets of our environment. Thematic maps depict a specific theme and help in revealing geospatial patterns and relations. The study and practice of map making has led to established cartographic design rules. Ever increasing availability of high-quality geospatial data coupled with continuously changing technologies for map making imply that one has to find the right mix between age-old principles and state-of-the-art technologies and trends when teaching thematic cartography. This paper presents a proposal on how to stimulate the creativity of students' thematic map making by describing the teaching approach and results of a map assignment for a course presented to a group of postgraduate geoinformatics students. Based on a reflection of the teaching and learning experience and an assessment of the thematic maps produced by the students, recommendations are provided for teaching today's university students how to create convincing and appealing thematic maps. An infographics summarizes the most important guidelines. Additionally, the student maps, as well as the maps revised by a trained cartographer, are available and can be used by others for teaching.

Energy issues are becoming increasingly common subjects of instruction in undergraduate- and graduate-level classrooms across a variety of disciplines. The interdisciplinary character of energy studies provides geographers with a great opportunity to present different applied and theoretical approaches to help students conceptualize energy issues from a critical perspective. This article presents a class intervention as an example of how to incorporate geographic concepts and political economic theory into the classroom to help students understand the social, political, economic, and environmental implications of energy production, distribution, and consumption at multiple scales from a critical perspective.

The premise of this essay is that energy geographies are complicated, and this in itself presents some pedagogical difficulties. As someone who wants students to critically examine and confront the complexity of energy systems, it can be frustrating when students react to demonstrate frustration, apathy, or even confusion. In what follows, I will lay out three complications of teaching energy geography: (1) empirical complexity, (2) confronting fossil fuel "embeddedness," (3) the energy culture fallacy.

Advocates for geographic information system (GIS) education contend that learning about GIS promotes students' spatial thinking. Empirical studies are still needed to elucidate the potential of GIS as an instructional tool to support spatial thinking in other geography courses. Using a non-equivalent control group research design, this study examines the effect of using Web-based GIS in a world geography course on the development of students' spatial thinking abilities. The findings indicate that Web-based GIS activities implemented in this study significantly enhanced students' spatial thinking skills.

World regional geography textbooks rarely focus on the process of region formation, despite frequent calls to reincorporate a regional approach to teaching global geography. An instructional strategy using problem-based learning in a small honors section of a large world regional geography course is described. Using a hypothetical scenario reorganizing the US State Department's metaregional structure, students conducted group research and presentations on the geopolitical consequences of allocating states to a metaregion. Results indicated that honors students acquired as much content knowledge as those in the regular lecture section and significantly greater awareness about the implications of metaregional membership.

The Center for Global Geography Education (CGGE) is a set of online modules exploring geographic issues, which allow collaborative analysis and discussion between international teams of undergraduates. Using data from trials held in 10 countries, the modules' effectiveness in improving student understanding of geographic concepts and appreciation for cross-cultural perspectives on the issues were evaluated. Analysis of qualitative and quantitative data revealed that CGGE achieved its aims of enhancing geographic knowledge and skills. The modules and their international collaboration design inspired high interest among students and professors. Specific revisions to their content are identified in order to foster deeper exchanges of international perspectives among university students. (Contains 4 figures, 4 tables, and 3 notes.)

Assessment is a key component of the learning process. In order to maximize student learning, instructors need to provide students with appropriate, explicit and timely assessment. Despite the potential benefits of problem-based learning, some instructors may be reluctant to adopt this approach because it will require them to modify their current assessment practices. In problem-based learning curricula, assessment should be used to encourage and reward student participation throughout the course. This paper presents an analytical rubric developed for diagnosis of student learning via formative assessment in a capstone environmental impact analysis course. The use and role of the analytical rubric in student grading is also explained. This rubric provides a template for how student learning could be assessed in other courses in geography curricula that employ a similar student-centred approach to learning. (Contains 5 tables.)

Outlines issues involved in the curriculum and teaching methods for a senior-year core course in the philosophies of contemporary geography. Discusses syllabus issues, course texts, and innovations in curriculum delivery, including the use of tutorless groups as a way of managing large numbers of students. (MJP)

Uses the example of a trail near Lancashire in Northern England to explore the educational values of rural trails. Maintains that studying trails can enhance the appreciation and teaching of conceptual matters as well as develop students' skills for informed observation and interpretation of field evidence. Includes an area map. (MJP)

Describes the development by the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) teaching materials. Explains that the demand for GIS professionals and the need to distinguish between the practical and theoretical aspects of GIS motivated the project. Examines the results of and prospects for the effort. (SG)

Discusses how analytical behavioral geography can be taught at all levels of education. Fundamental concepts and principles of behavioral geography are examined including course content, models of man, models of the environment, perception and cognition, information diffusion and adoption, space preferences, and time-path analysis. (Author/RM)

Describes a two-dimensional sand-tank model that illustrates the influence of ground slope on tile drain discharge and the movement of groundwater in general. The model can be used to demonstrate the effect of topography on sub-surface water movement in agricultural catchments, thus it is a useful hydrological teaching aid. (Author/BSR)

Describes an international dialogue project based at the University of Lund, Sweden. The project amassed over 100 video-taped interviews with academics in geography and related fields. The tapes have potential for teachers wishing to explore the oral history of geography, the role of language and social structures in shaping research, and cultural differences in the development of the subject. (Author/BSR)

Describes a field exercise exemplifying aspects of the variable source area model. States that objectives of the exercise are to ensure that students understand why there is a variation in discharge in different parts of a basin, learn a dilution gauging method, and perform necessary calculations. Appendices describe the Gulp Injection method and the Constant Rate Injection method. (LS)

One way geographical educators can help local communities understand their environment is to offer a course focusing on local regional geography using the concept of regional synthesis. Describes specific mechanics and evaluates short-term outcomes of such a course in Hawaii. Discusses potential uses. Journal availability: see SO 507 262. (Author/CK)

Outlines the history, use, and value of simulations (role play, operational games, and individual exercises) in geography instruction. The author stresses that, while simulations improve student motivation and increase interest in concepts, their effectiveness depends on proper integration into course curricula. (AM)

Discusses paradigms of modern geography (quantification, Marxism, behavioralism, and systems theory) as a guide for integrating concepts in teaching geography at the university level. (KC)