Pandemic Geography Teaching
Casey Burkholder and Katie Hamill
Casey Burkholder is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of New Brunswick. Her work focuses on mobilizing DIY media making practices with youth to address issues of concern in local contexts. In particular, she is interested in cellphilm method (intention + cellphone film production) to explore young people’s lived experiences. Her current research focuses on New Brunswick-based DIY activism with queer, trans, and non-binary youth and teachers. She is also working on a project exploring the supports and barriers to teaching sex education in New Brunswick schools. Casey recently co-edited the book Fieldnotes in Qualitative Education and Social Science Research: Approaches, Practices, and Ethical Considerations (Routledge, 2020).
Katie Hamill is a doctoral student and visual artist living, working, and playing on the unsurrendered and unceded traditional lands of the Wolastoqiyik peoples. Through all of her work, Katie seeks to understand how art practice can create identity and belonging through self-expression while simultaneously demonstrating the intersectional ways in which we experience our surrounding environment. Her research focuses on critical human rights education in urban New Brunswick classrooms and arts-based research as a tool for social justice.
How might we encourage pre-service teachers to think deeply and politically about space, place, time, and the Anthropocene amid a Pandemic? Katie and I have just finished co-teaching an Introduction to Teaching Geography class. This course is intended for pre-service teachers to begin to think about the practice of teaching geography: inclusive of ideas about place, space, time, geography, humans, and the Anthropocene. The goal of this course is to encourage students to become reflective and inquisitive geography educators, by critically investigating Social Studies & Geography curricula, Grades 6-12. We aim to reflect and extend upon curricular concepts, and engage multiple ways of knowing/experiencing along the way, highlighting that space, time, place, and environment is experienced differently and should not be taught as though they are neutral or static concepts.
In 2019, when we first taught the course together, we designed specific assignments to encourage students to think politically about place, space, time, and the Anthropocene. One of our 2019 assignments asked learners to geotag a map highlighting price differentials for a single consumer good across the city of Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. We asked learners to map consumer goods in order to understand the scale of income inequality in New Brunswick through an anthropology of gentrification / luxury / neglect / abandonment/ etc. We also asked students to follow and document a worker’s labour for the day in order to understand the extent to which labour separates and connects people in the city in ways that are largely invisible. Both of these assignments were inspired by Dr. Shannon Walsh’s 2015 course called The Creative City at the School of Creative Media at City University, Hong Kong, when Casey was her Teaching Assistant.
Having taught the Intro to Teaching Geography course together for the first time in 2019, we began thinking about how we might change our course in March of this year. Originally planned to run in person from May/June, we adapted our Introduction to Teaching Geography to fit the Pandemic. In each of 10 classes, we asked learners to engage with readings, video games, short films, interactive art projects, and then to Do & Make something based on a prompt that we provided. We offer a few examples of some of the media making that we asked our learners to engage in so that they might think about space, community, and the Pandemic, as well as our own examples of how we took up the prompts. For example, our first Do & Make assignment asked students to map their quarantine spaces for psychogeographies. We provided students with the prompt, “Create a visual representation of the space that you are currently social distancing from. We want you to map your quarantine living space for psychogeographies (e.g. the things that you think and feel in the space.)”
Katie and I modeled each of the Do & Make assignments with our own exemplar texts. I have been full time parenting while teaching during the pandemic, so have weaved my experiences into each of the exemplar texts. My kid is kind of like another co-instructor this semester. (And likely next semester, too).
Casey Maps Psychogeographies with Frances
Legend:
Red= Where I am mad
Purple= Where I am happy
Pink= Where I am learning
Blue= Where I am sad
Yellow= Where I like to do my thinking
Orange= Where I am grumpy
Katie’s Exemplar
Here is a quick map of my living room. I have been spending the majority of my time here and largely consider it to be my safe space.
Our students also used a variety of modes and methods to explore notions of space and psychogeographies. Some drew maps, others used images, some used multimedia, some created short cellphilms (cellphone + intention + film production), and others created more traditional maps.
In our sixth Do & Make assignment, we asked learners to collage their experiences of the pandemic. We prompted learners with the following: “Create a collage (of any size) that represents your experience of time during that Pandemic.” My exemplar highlighted the ways in which I felt the city shrink as I retreated to my home, and have found teaching while parenting a toddler to be a difficult task.
Casey’s OMG Collage
Katie’s Collage
In our tenth and final Do & Make assignment, we asked learners to, “Explore and document a way of taking care. Of yourself. Of your family. Of your roommates. Imagine what radical approaches to care might look like. As our colleague Dr. Sabine Lebel has noted, “How can we resist the neoliberal quest to download all care to the individual, drowning us in feelings of debilitating guilt & mind-numbing inadequacy? How can we free self-care from everlasting & damning judgement? How can self-care be connected to care for self, community, and environment? Thinking a lot about care practiced by queer communities. Thinking about what queer ecologies can tell us about knowing our webs of oxygen, food, water, community and chosen family” (Pandemic Art Project Day 16, 2020, April 1). So, in some way, document radical care, for example, highlighting your “webs of oxygen, food, water, community and/or chosen family”.
Casey’s Exemplar
April 3, 2020
“Today, my kid is sick. She has a fever. It is freaking me out a bit. I set her up beside me in the office. I made a bed on the floor. I made a popsicle out of pedialyte (the kid version of Gatorade). I am trying to work and write. But I am feeling very worried. We have been alone for three weeks, with my partner doing the grocery shopping. We have really been inside. But, still, I’m anxious. I’ve been feeling deeply anxious throughout this quarantine-ing. And I just want the snow to go away. But, I am employed, housed, healthy enough. I am looking to my community and seeing how I can help. But today, individually, within my home, taking care looks a lot like this:”
April 10 Update
“All better now! She received medical care over the phone, then antibiotics + time, and now she is fine.”
Katie’s exemplar
“Something I have been thinking about a lot during this time is the social determinants of health – the social and economic conditions that impact and create conditions which influence the conditions of daily lives for individuals and groups. The narrative is that COVID-19 attacks all bodies, but I have found that the news cycle has given little attention to the various communities that will be impacted the most, and whose health will suffer in other ways due to the economic crisis. The Coalition for the Human Rights of Indigenous Peoples wrote a letter on April 14, 2020, within the letter the Coalition has requested that the federal government grant Indigenous peoples the permission to restrict access to their communities. The letter was endorsed by a variety of prominent Canadian actors, however I have yet to see any advancements or special precautions to protect Indigenous peoples by the federal or provincial governments.”
Click to see the Coalition’s Statement on COVID-19
These Do & Make assignments have encouraged learners to think politically and artfully about what geography teaching can look like. We have modeled our own anxieties and frustrations and hopes as we have experienced the Pandemic as a way of taking care of ourselves, our communities, and our students. We have recorded personal conversations that feel more intimate than they might have otherwise in “regular” face to face teaching. We have also adapted our plans as the course unfolded. We found ourselves changing the course after the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police, in particular the ways in which we had designed a course section on digital activisms that had previously been centered on climate activism online. We guess the thing that we have learned about teaching within the Pandemic has been the need to use our pedagogical spaces in order to draw students’ attention to the things that are going on in the world and in our community, and work together, intimately and immediately, in order to push toward social change.