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Dr.Bob Bednarz,
Geography 306

Dr. Margaret Ezell,
English 481

Dr. Don Maxwell,
Engineering 111-112

Dr. Arun Srinivasa,
Engineering 111-112

Geography 306
Taught by

Dr. Bob Bednarz, Professor, College of Geosciences-Geography

Overview

Geography (GEOG) 306 is a great example of how an instructor has incorporated a unique inquiry-based project into a large introductory course. Unlike the other examples, Dr. Bednarz course is not one that is solely based on inquiry. Rather, his course is taught in a predominantly traditional style with the inclusion of a unique project. The project that Dr. Bob Bednarz has created for this class not only helps students to apply the information they learn to the real world, but also gives them an opportunity to express their understanding of the subject matter in a non-traditional way.

GEOG 306 is usually the first and last class on urban geography most of the students who elect to take it will ever take. It is treated as a survey course, and attempts to acquaint students with as much of the field of urban geography as possible in the span of a semester. Because of this a large number of topics most are covered briefly. The project Dr. Bednarz created helps encourage students to think about, reflect on and apply a few topics to the real world in greater depth.

Details

When GEOG 306 was first taught it was a small class which only had about 25-30 students enrolled each semester. When it was this size Dr. Bob Bednarz assigned his students a term paper to complete each semester. He noticed that students were treating their term paper like a literature review. They were going to the library, reading a select number of books or articles on certain topics and summarizing them. He did not feel as though this type of assignment was benefitting the students adequately for the amount of time they spent writing and he spent revising it. He wanted to situate their learning in a real world context and get them to think “outside of the box” of the traditional college term paper with a project that would require a reasonable but adequate amount of thought and effort on the part of the students.

Dr. Bednarz decided that the best way to help students connect their in class learning to the real world outside of class was to make the real world a vital part of their project completion. With this in mind, he decided to have them complete a series of “Caption Photo” projects. In these projects students venture out into the real world and take a photograph or utilize a photograph they had taken at an earlier date and use it to demonstrate one of the concepts they learn about during class. Students then use their knowledge about urban geography to write an extended “Photo Caption” connecting the photograph to a topic that was covered in class. Dr. Bednarz asks his students to try to make their Photo Captions emulate those they have seen in textbooks but also go into enough depth that he can see their thinking and reasoning about how the photograph relates to the topic they have chosen.

This Photo Caption project is intentionally a smaller scale project than the term paper Dr. Bednarz assigned when the class was smaller. Dr. Bednarz found that when he assigned a large final paper to his students many of them never got the chance to respond to or utilize the feedback he spent much of his time giving. Some students didn’t even return to pick up their papers after the end of the semester in which case his time spent writing feedback was largely wasted. With this in mind, Dr. Bednarz specifically made the Photo Caption project smaller and asks students to hand in 4 Photo Captions with due dates spread out over the course of the semester. In this way students are able to utilize the feedback he gives them on the earlier submissions to improve those due later in the semester.

As you might expect, while many students turn in well done projects, some are exceptional. When a student approached Dr. Bednarz to ask if she could take his course for honors credit, he came up with a great idea to provide examples of outstanding projects to students in future semester as well as to give some recognition to the students who completed those outstanding projects. His idea was to have the honors student sift through the projects from past semesters and pick out those that were truly exceptional examples of a variety of concepts and use them to create a website. Dr. Bednarz can now use this website not only to provide his students with examples of good projects but also to incorporate real world examples of concepts into his lectures.

This glimpse inside Dr. Bednarz’s course provides an exceptional example of how inquiry can be incorporated into a large introductory course. His students were encouraged to think about, reflect on and apply their in-class learning to the real world which in turn helped them to learn the urban geography content of the course in greater depth.    
    

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