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Landcare groups and university
students working together
In 1994 I took up a position teaching in the School of Resource and Environmental Management at the Australian National University. I was asked to run a new unit - "Applied Geography". The course involves students doing a research project. I decided to make the "Landcare movement" a uniting research focus for all these projects. "Landcare" is a community based environmental movement that developed in Australia in the 1980s. It evolved as a result of individual land owners grouping together to address environmental problems facing their local regions. In 1989 an alliance was formed between the two peak non government organisations representing the Australian conservation movement and farmers to lobby the federal Australian government to provide funds and coordination for Landcare. This alliance of two organisations that previously had viewed each with mutual suspicion played a major role in the federal government designating the 1990s as the "Decade of Landcare". Using Landcare as a focus for university teaching has proved highly successful for both the students and the Landcare groups involved. I would encourage any community based Landcare like environmental groups or teachers who are interested in doing something similar to borrow any relevant ideas from my course. With this in mind the following outlines some details of how the course was set up and how it has been run. "Applied Geography" is one of three units that full time students need to complete in their last semester of study before either graduating or going on to postgraduate research thesis work. The Geography department established the course with the aim of providing a research based "finishing" unit to allow the pick of the 3rd year students to apply the knowledge and skills that they have developed in their studies. The whole assessment for the course is a mark for one major research project. The students are required to produce a substantial report of about 6,000 words. They are told from the beginning of their research that they have to remember that the audience that they are writing for are the Landcare groups that they are working with. The required research is described to the students as a trial run for the kind of research they might be doing in the following year in the work place or as postgraduate researchers. The idea that Landcare could be a suitable uniting research topic came to mind when I was approached by a member of a nearby Landcare group. Canberra, the national capital of Australia, is a city of 300,000 people surrounded by farming land. The Landcare groups that approached me are from the Braidwood region, an area of mixed cattle and sheep grazing one hour by road east of Canberra. The Landcare group was interested in having students assist them in establishing a baseline monitoring project for a riparian zone project that they had established. Their need for such help is a result of an Australian wide pattern of Landcare groups being given increasing responsibilities to monitor various projects to address environmental problems that they are involved in but often not having the resources to do so. This fortuitous situation of mutual interest has lead to what I hope will be an ongoing fruitful collaboration. From the point of view of the students one of the most successful outcomes of this collaboration has been the very positive feedback they have received that the skills they have built up in three years of study are of some direct practical relevance. From the viewpoint of Landcare groups the collaboration has provided willing researchers who have been able to work on projects that Landcare groups have wanted to be carried out but have often not had the resources to do so by themselves. Two years down the track it is worth reflecting on the opportunities that the Landcare focus can provide for a university course and some of the main factors involved in making such a collaboration work. The "Applied Geography" course is taught over a 15 week period in the second half of the academic year. Over this time the class meets 13 times for a weekly two to three hour seminar. The other two weeks of the semester are the university teaching break during which students are expected to do most of the field work for their project. Each year late in the previous semester I have called a meeting of prospective students and explained that course is about them doing a research project related to Landcare in the Canberra-Braidwood region. The second time the course was offered I was also able to invite along students who had completed the course in the previous year to talk about their experience doing the unit. I also had representatives of Landcare groups come to talk about the kind of issues they would like students to look at. Six weeks latter the second semester starts and in the first meeting with the class I stress how different it will be from other units that they have done at university. Much of the first class is devoted to explaining that instead of a conventional lecture based unit where there is an onus on the lecturer to deliver information in this unit the onus is on the student to design and carry out a research project. From the beginning I stress that my role is as a facilitator assisting students to do their research and that the course is what they make it. Students are told that what we do in our weekly meetings is up to them. They are also required to develop a research plan outlining:
Aims of course
At the first meeting I outline some of the important Landcare issues facing the local region and encourage a discussion around these issues as a first step in students thinking about possible topics. Issues that I mention include:
To assist the students in this familiarisation process I take them on a field trip to areas facing environmental problems that Landcare groups are addressing. I also set up as many meetings as possible with key people involved in Landcare in the region (eg Landcare group coordinators and government officials). After this field trip students are required to develop a research plan in consultation with me. There is a heavy emphasis in the class on developing skills in giving oral presentations and as part of this in the early weeks of the course each student is required in the weekly seminars to outline their progress in defining their research topics.
In the first meeting I also go to great lengths to establish an ethic that I try to nurture throughout the course of encouraging students to bring their respective interests and skills together to assist each others projects. My main aim in this regard is to get students with contrasting backgrounds in human or physical geography to learn from each other. An example of how this has worked has been students assisting each other develop methodologies to carry out monitoring. Student projects have typically involved monitoring either:
In this first class the contrasts and comparisons between physical and human geography methods are also explored. An outcome of this class is that students with differing backgrounds in human and physical geography are encouraged to work together both in establishing methodologies for carrying out such research and in doing the required field work. Hence students with previous expertise in just devising vegetation or soil monitoring projects find themselves helping devise questionaries that are aimed at exploring social aspects of Landcare. Likewise someone with experience in social science research has found themselves helping devise a research project on bank erosion and then followed this up by being involved in the field work of surveying changes in river banks. The success of the class has been highly dependant on having small classes. Having taught the unit with 10 students in the first year and 22 in the second year I can report that the ideal size for such a time intensive approach to teaching is about 10-12. A larger class size leads to much less personal supervision of projects and also makes it impossible for everyone to be involved in everyone's else field work. I intend placing a quota on future classes to keep the class to about 12 students. Another key factor in making the course work has been the adoption of flexible learning plans. In these plans the students are required to outline:
The learning plan process makes great demands on my time as it usually requires each student having at least two or three meetings with me to finalise them. This time, however, is certainly well spent as it is a most valuable process because it requires the students to think through what they want to get out of the unit and how they are going to do this. It challenges students to extend themselves by identifying what areas they would like to develop further skills in. The learning plans also challenge students who have become "strategic" rather than "deep" learners and have in previous units successfully worked out what is the minimum required in each unit to get the most marks. The learning plan throws the onus back on the student to think about what learning is about and for them in this context to set some learning challenges for themselves. The learning plan is a flexible document that can be changed at any time by mutual agreement of the student and myself until two weeks before the end of the course. By this late stage in the course I require a firm outline of what is to be submitted and how it is to be assessed. The only set aspect of the assessment guidelines has been that at least 20% of the final mark has had to be for an oral presentation to their class mates and interested Landcare members. Many students have chosen to have their presentation worth a higher percentage. A number have also been given the opportunity by Landcare groups to present their results at Landcare meetings. At the first class I have introduced the question of how oral presentation should be marked by showing and talking to the following overhead. How do we assess verbal presentations?
In both years that I have taught the unit the class has opted for peer assessment and have chosen to spend a portion of every seminar during the course giving trial run progress oral presentations to develop oral presentation (and marking) skills. The students have to develop their own set of criteria for marking these oral presentations. A number of classes are also devoted to talking about what makes a good presentation and students are required to come to these classes with summarised notes from set readings on this topic. As well as assessing the trial talks of their peers students are required to attend a talk somewhere else on the university campus and assess the speakers talk in terms of the criteria the class developed. The students are also required to produce a poster outlining their project. The aim of the posters is to give further feedback to Landcare members. The posters are not marked but the student can not complete the course until they have completed a poster that I judge is satisfactory to go on public display outlining their projects. Finally I should give you some details of student projects to highlight the broad range of issues that they have covered. Landcare groups in the Braidwood-Canberra area have been given student reports on issues including:
If you are a member of a Landcare type group wanting to establish similar collaborative research schemes with university students you should make this suggestion to relevant staff in the Geography or Environmental Science departments of the university nearest you. In developing any such research please feel free to pinch any ideas outlined above that you wish and to contact me if you think I might be able to help you in any other way.
Dr Richard Baker |
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