Thursday 17th December 2015 - Updating reading lists

Every year, a couple of months before I start teaching my final year course, I go right through the reading lists that I will issue to the students.  This is quite a big job, as the tasks I give students to undertake - both for an assessed essay and for individual seminars - are quite loose and give them latitude to choose to concentrate on the countries and situations that interest them most as illustrative of general processes operating across Europe.  (The course is called 'The Social Geography of Europe'.)

I look at the dates of everything on the list and then, remembering that this year most students will have been born in 1994 or 1995, I scrutinise closely anything published before then: only the most important works (generally of a theoretical nature) survive that cull.   I know that when I was a student I was dubious about reading material written before I was born.

I also look at the bibliographies in the essays submitted by last year's students.  These often contain interesting materials that I have not discovered for myself.  They always need checking, however, both for utility and for the accuracy of student referencing!

And then there is the major task of looking for the latest materials.  At one time this involved going along the shelves in the stacks of the library, picking the last year's journals off the shelf and scrutinising them.  Now, of course, it is simply a question of getting into the set of electronic journals that the library subscribes to.  At this stage I add some articles to my reading lists even though I haven't read them - but I have read the abstract and made a decision on that basis.

So what reflections do I arrive at contrasting this article search process of today with that of, say 20 or 30 years ago when there were no internet possibilities?

1. There has been an explosion in article publishing.  Journals which had 3 issues a year in the 1980s have now moved to 12 or even more issues.  And some run a long way ahead of themselves: in the first half of December at least two journals I have been perusing on line already have two complete issues for 2016 'published'.

2. Has the quality of articles risen alongside the number?  It doesn't appear so to me.  Internet searching enables one to identify many cases where authors are publishing effectively the same piece of work in more than one journal.  And with the habit of pre-publication  (articles being made available on the internet before they are formally published) some journals seem to have a remarkable number of cases of 'article withdrawn' or of corrigenda.  This smacks of poor refereeing and editing, but also of the 'rush to publish.'

3. In the areas I am looking for the massive growth in publication has been not been in studies of aggregate data sets and surveys but in qualitative pieces based on a small number of in-depth interviews - and these are often of unusual cases or circumstances.  It is a broad generalisation to make, but parts of social science have witnessed a reduction in the interest in taking a broad view of everyday phenomena and instead now concentrate on interesting one-off situations with fewer potential outcomes of policy relevance.

4. Searching of journals not put out by the big commercial publishers has become well-nigh impossible.  There are many excellent journals produced under the auspices of national geographical bodies, for example - and often they contain very good articles in English.  But subscriptions to these have disappeared as UK libraries have had to pay the ever-rising costs of the 'big bundles' from Elsevier, Wiley and so on.  And it is very time consuming to seek the web sites of such journals one by one, and pointless from the point of a student reading list since in many cases articles are not available on line.  English has become the dominant language of publication, along with the preponderance of international (mainly UK or US based) publishers, and I regret the loss of diversity this involves.

5. The opening up of China is very clear in the journals I am considering.  20 or 30 years ago there was scarcely any coverage of China at all - now it seems that almost every issue of every journal contains at least one piece on China.  And that is much to be welcomed.

I know I could be more systematic in my searches, but I have always revelled in the serendipitous finds from my own methods - even now when they don't involve hours in the bowels of the library.  I may be looking for materials for my final year course, but I am often distracted to fascinating articles on other topics.  And although I would argue that there is now too much being published of poor quality or utility, there are still some marvellously provocative and thoughtful studies out there.  I am sure my students will agree, andI hope they will be impressed when in early February I post up reading lists with a lot of 2015, or even 2016, works referred to.  

Saturday 14th November 2015 - Chinese universities in evolution

I am writing this whilst on the first leg of my return from speaking at a learning and teaching conference.  I am currently somewhere over the Timor Sea between Australia and Singapore.  It is a good moment to reflect.

The conference I have been at was the ‘China / Australia Summit on Teaching and Learning’ (CAUSTL for short).  A few years ago the top flight universities in China (the C9) and in Australia (the Group of 8) agreed to meet every year to discuss collaboration and innovation issues in undergraduate education.  Two meetings have now been held – the first at the Harbin Institute of Technology, and the second at the University of Adelaide.  The next two are already lined up – at Xi’an Jiao Tong and at the University of Queensland.  I had been invited to the Adelaide meeting as one of two external plenary speakers.

A first point of reflection is what a good idea this collaboration between two groups of universities is.  I should have thought of creating something like it while I was the chair of the Russell Group’s PVCs for Learning and Teaching – but I didn’t. 

But a second interesting issue to me is how much the leadership in Chinese universities (or at least in the leading ones) is thinking of educational reform.  This adds to the picture I gained from visits to Tongji (in Shanghai) and Nanjing last year.  The story seems to go like this:

Until recently China needed universities that could produce the technical specialists to drive the modernisation and economic development of the country.  It also needed strong application-based research to underpin such development.  Top universities put a lot of effort into research, and continued educating students by strongly didactic methods in programmes that were massively  disciplinary in focus.

In both Tongji and Nanjing last year I heard that they wanted to shift the emphasis to education.  At Nanjing in particular there was a strong interest in the internationalisation of student experience.  As part of the background preparation for my contribution in Adelaide I read the strategic planning statements relating to learning and teaching for each of the C9 universities (and the Australian Group of 8 as well!) and found that theme now to be general for all 17 institutions.  But the Chinese universities are also now very keen on bringing in student-centred learning, small group teaching,  project-based (rather than didactic) curricula, and moving towards inter-disciplinary and more general education.  These trends were very much confirmed throughout the Adelaide meeting by all the Chinese present who gave papers. 

The argument, as articulated by a couple of speakers and agreed by others, is that China’s development is now at a point where it needs to produce more generalists to add to the specialists – and that as the country looks increasingly outward it needs graduates who can operate in international arenas.  One of the most fascinating interventions was from a Vice-President of a research-intensive university who told how performance evaluation in his university had been changed from 1:1 research and teaching to a ratio of 5:3 in favour of teaching.

Interestingly, a Chinese colleague indicated that one reason for driving Chinese universities more towards producing students with general transferable skills is because such attributes are inadequately developed in a generation that come from one-child families where they have never learnt teamwork or the art of compromise with peers.

There are clearly going to be problems in changing educational emphases in these ways – not least because university teachers often have a vested interest in the continuation of the system in which they rose to their current positions.  So change will take time.  But some of the Chinese universities represented at the Adelaide meeting are putting considerable resources into staff training and development to deliver the new ways.  Administrative structures also need reform.  As one Vice-President said, “in relation to these reforms, we have first class students, but only second class teachers, and third class administration.”

The changes in Chinese undergraduate education being actively talked about – and already being implemented in many cases – are exciting.  We in the west have got so used to stereotyping Chinese education as being about rote learning and an emphasis on the words of the professor.  We need to revise those views and think about how we can interact with Chinese universities – and with Chinese students – in ways that are already being explored in Australia.  And, as always, China is a place to watch for significant new developments.     

Thursday 1st October 2015 - Student initiation to university life

How should we view the moment of entry into a new status?  Such moments are marked by rituals and ceremonies in almost all societies - taking place at puberty, at marriage, at the completion of apprenticeships, at the end of military training, at being accepted into a club or society, or at the point of being accepted into the citizenship of a country not of one's birth.

In the university world we have a particular ceremony to mark graduation.  But, at least in the UK, we don't generally have a ceremony or ritual to mark the change of status that actually becoming a student involves.  Instead we may have a 'welcome talk' from someone important within the university, but otherwise it is bureaucratic necessity that dominates the earliest stages of arrival at university - at least from the point of the university authorities.

Actually, when I arrived at Oxford there was a ritual to be gone through. We all had to put on subfusc (a dark suit, white shirt, white bow tie, and gown for the men - black skirt, white blouse, black ribbon tied round the next, and gown for the women) and parade to a Latin ceremony called 'matriculation' which took place in one of Oxford's grandest buildings - the Sheldonian Theatre.  I have no memory of what was said or done, other than that my neighbour at this ceremony had smuggled into his mortar-board a tiny kitten which he then had to keep hushed throughout the proceedings.

I note from Oxford's web site that matriculation still takes place - symbolically admitting students to the new status of members of the university.   Although I also note that the details of who should and who should not matriculate seem designed as much as anything to exclude certain groups who would elsewhere be very much included as members of the university.  See:

http://www.ox.ac.uk/students/new/matriculation

(I will leave on one side recent accusations about other rituals of admission to aspects of Oxford life. I knew nothing of the existence of dining societies such as the Bullingdon throughout my 6 years at Oxford, let alone any alleged intimate relationship with pigs as part of initiation into other clubs.)

These thoughts about rituals and rites of passage have been set off because I have just returned from visiting some Portuguese universities.  Established students in Portugal have a uniform that is remarkably similar to Oxford's subfusc - with the addition of a black jacket for women, and of a cape worn over one shoulder.  This cape can also be adorned with badges showing various achievements whilst a student.

The start of the academic year is marked by a formal ceremony with processions of academics, speeches by the Rector, music (the Portuguese guitar, played by black-clad students features strongly), and food and drink receptions.  I have witnessed these in previous years.  Established students seeking to sign new ones up for activities are formally dressed.  This all makes the process of becoming a new student rather impressive and significant - not just a signature on a piece of paper.

But there is another side to these activities.  Down in the city centre I saw several groups of established students, in their black 'uniforms', instructing new students to perform various self-denigrating stunts - such as singing songs whilst wearing cardboard asses' ears, carrying signs with strange incantations on them, having tee-shirts smothered in various cooking sauces.  It all looked as if it was being done with good humour.  But there are reports in the Portuguese media about things getting out of hand.  The rituals are collectively called Praxe and there have been reports of deaths in recent years (students swept off a beach in the Algarve while undertaking a Praxe task), and of serious injuries.  Whist waiting at Lisbon Airport yesterday for my flight the television news magazine was clearly holding a debate about whether Praxe activities hold be curtailed, although the sound was turned off so I couldn't follow it (even if my limited Portuguese had ben up to it).  The previous day, at various bars around the city, crowds of students - older in their black uniforms and capes, and new in ordinary dress - were singing and laughing in the late afternoon. But I didn't stick around to see how things progressed later into the night - although I would not expect alcohol to play such a significant role in Portugal as it certainly would amongst UK students.

So I have mixed feelings about these rites of passage and signs of 'club' membership.  On the one hand I rather like the smartness and sense of belonging of the traditional Portuguese student 'uniform'.  I also like the idea of some way of marking the accession of new students into the wider community of student status and as members of the university.  But on the other hand initiation ceremonies - as so often in sports clubs but also in other spheres of life - can create opportunities for the abuse of the newcomers by those established within a group, and some of the tasks that (allegedly) have been asked of initiates may be beyond good taste and acceptability.   The official side of rites of passage may be fine - it's the additional informal aspects that create difficulties. 

Monday 7th September 2015 - Serendipity, choice and research agendas

What do academics, entrepreneurs, and artists have in common?  To me the answer is that they can choose what to do rather than being told what to do.  Certainly their choices must be 'sellable' to someone else, but they have much more freedom than almost any other profession to follow their own instincts and their own interests.  Entrepreneurs and artists have to sell a product, an idea or an experience.  Academics need to sell their ideas for research to funding bodies or organisations, and their written outputs to publishers and journals.  But the freedom to choose what to work on, within those constraints, is very considerable, and a real privilege: we are in my view one of the luckiest of professions, to have that choice.  And the choice is sometimes driven by serendipity rather than strategy.

Exactly a week ago I visited a village in Normandy where, many years ago, my own research career took a new turn.  How did this happen?

On the day I arrived to take up my lectureship in Sheffield a senior colleague gave me the news that I would be accompanying him to Normandy on a field class the following Easter.  He had been there over the summer and identified the ideal area, and a hotel that could put up a student group. (I discovered later that one of the prime factors in the choice had been the presence in a nearby village of an outstanding restaurant.)  I knew that taking a group of students to do field work in rural France was going to be a challenge for me.  For a start, my doctoral research had been carried out in Switzerland and Italy, on the impacts of tourism on rural communities, and I knew little about conditions in rural France - or about the data sets that might enable students to create projects there.  Secondly, with the exception of one spa town, there was no tourism in the area of Normandy we were going to, so it would not be possible to use the field class to test any of the ideas I had generated in my doctorate.  Thirdly, my French was much rustier than either my German or my Italian - both of which languages I had been using much more recently.

However, another doctoral student who inhabited the same workroom as me in Oxford had been writing his thesis on population change in the Massif Central of France, and I had picked up ideas on possible lines of enquiry for other areas of rural France.  The field class was a tolerable success, and over the next couple of years (and without the senior colleague accompanying me) I developed it into quite an intense investigation of rural depopulation in an impoverished agricultural region.

And at the same time my own research appetites were whetted.  I got into the literature on rural France; I explored rural depopulation more generally; I learned about French data sources; I worked on my French.  And my first post-doctoral research theme emerged - rural population change.  

Could I 'sell' that interest?  Well, it proved very sellable indeed at a period before second home developments, rural commuting to cities, or rural holidays had transformed the fortunes of poorer rural regions.  I secured funding from the forerunner of today's Economic and Social Research Council, and from the British Academy; a research team at the University of Caen learned what I was doing and invited me to join them, with their funding coming from French state research sources; local radio in the UK was interested in whether my findings in rural France would also hold true in areas such as the Peak District.  And I got those all-important publications - at least three book chapters (one in French), and (more importantly) three articles in good journals.  

I later moved on to other research interests - migration, the geography of languages, minority groups in cities - but in each case there has been an event or happening of some kind that has set off a change of direction in my enthusiasms.  I owe a great deal to that colleague who had organised for me to lead a field class in Normandy with him.  But returning there last week, I recognised that my interest in the area had not dissipated.  There are new issues there, new patterns of change.  Apart from going back to a beautiful area (and yes, the restaurants are still excellent - as is the cider, the calvados, the cream and so on), perhaps I will look up some of my old materials and data sets, and take up research to bring them up to date to analyse what has changed over the last 40 years or so, and take up visiting there again.

Friday 25th September 2015 - The human signpost on campus

I don't think it's just because I'm a geographer.  It's not because I want to show off.  I'm not doing it to try to strike up long-term relationships, or use it as a 'chat up' line.  But when I see a student looking earnestly at a map of the campus my first instinct is to go over to them and say 'Can I help you?'

With this year's new cohort of students arriving over the last couple of weeks, I've lost count of the number of times I have made that enquiry.  So, who have I met?

There was the Lithuanian student and his parents who also wanted a family photograph taken outside Firth Hall.  The postgraduate from Turkey who I walked along with since I was going to pass the building she had so far failed to find.  I have helped an American student, confused by the practice of floor numbering on this side of the Atlantic, which is different from that in the States (curiously, the lift in the multi-storey car park at Sheffield Station would be more at home in Pittsburgh in that respect).   I have directed quite a few Chinese students, as well as a Columbian.

It isn't always plain sailing.  One year I offered assistance to a French student and his parents who, when they found out that I had some seniority in the University, wanted a detailed explanation of the marks (les notes) we give in the UK which work on a different scale than in France, and the father needed that explanation in French.

The bit that IS about me as a geographer is that I usually ask where those I am trying to help are from.  I have a reasonable mental map of several parts of the world and can often produce some hidden titbit of information about wherever it is that adds to the impression of humanity that assistance gives.  Often people will name the city they are from and quite often I know the name of the university there - and often new postgraduates in Sheffield have actually studied in the institution I have named.

But there is one question in my mind about this whole aspect of campus life at the start of the new academic session.  Why is it that so many other people in the university - colleagues, established students - walk past the poor individual trying to orientate a map and don't offer to help?  It's a simple gesture but one that is always much appreciated and that helps newcomers to feel that the people around them really care.

Thursday 17th September 2015 - The university community coming together: the 'Big Walk'

Today I've been involved in one of those glorious activities that brings the whole of the university community together - the 'One Day Big Walk Challenge.'  Over 120 of us have just walked the 19 miles from Edale in the Peak District National Park back to the University to raise money for research into pulmonary arterial hypertension - a terrible disease that has a lower life expectancy than even the 'worst' of the cancers, pancreatic cancer.  100 or so of us joined 21 colleagues who had already walked the Pennine Way from north to south, adding the extra lap back to Sheffield.

So what was so good about it?

Well firstly the scenery was spectacular.  We made the steep climb up from Edale to Hollins Cross in glorious sunshine, with mist lingering on the top of Kinder Scout to our west (it was early - not long after 8 o'clock).  Then we had the Edale Valley on our left and Castleton on our right as we descended to Hope.  Later we climbed the old Roman causeway to reach Stanage Edge and then walked along that to Burbage and thence back to Sheffield along the Ringinglow Road and down the Round Walk, in lovely early autumn afternoon sunshine.

Then there was the camaraderie, and the chance to walk and talk with so many colleagues from all over the university.  Although the Vice-Chancellor was not able to join us, there were three current University Executive Board members on the walk, as well as two recent departees (one of them being me).  But it was the chance conversations with people from all faculties and from all professional services that made it so memorable. It's nice to meet new people as well as seeing old friends and colleagues in different situations.    There were porters, technicians, research funding managers, learning and teaching support people, human resources specialists, as well as many academics from every faculty.  I was surprised to find two Chinese postgraduate students with us - they had only arrived in Sheffield two months ago but saw this as an opportunity to explore the English countryside.  I walked at different points with pro-Vice-Chancellors and secretaries, IT technicians and senior lecturers, planning officers and events organisers.  For much of the journey I was in a middle group who took our breaks together.  It was only in the last few miles that we got more strung out.

And then there was the reaction from others not involved in the walk.  A walker from Manchester joined my group at one point and was impressed by what we were doing.  The Anglers' Rest in Bamford had a welcome sign out for all of us, and a free bottle of water for those who wished to claim it, our graduate and honorary graduate the distinguished mountaineer Andy Cave joined us for a few miles, a walking group near Burbage listened with interest to the story of what we were raising money for, and coming back into the city people were asking us how far we had walked and what our cause was. (We were by then all wearing matching tee-shirts proclaiming our cause.)

So, it was great day in all respects.  And despite my advancing age my feet and legs stood up better to the challenge than did those of some much younger colleagues: 'training walks' over the last few weeks (although none had been anything like as long as 19 miles) had clearly helped.

So has it been worth it in terms of the research funding objective?  Well the overall team's total stands at around £55k, against a total of £60k which we should reach.  Anyone wanting to contribute to my own total (currently just under £400) can do so at

https://www.justgiving.com/Paul-White40/

But that has been only part of it.  To me, one of the greatest aspects of the day has been the university acting as an integrated community.  The worlds of too many people are confined to their own department or service: today was a chance to open the door on the wider university.

Tuesday 18th August 2015 - Why God could not be appointed as a university lecturer

This week's edition of Times Higher Education contains a nice cartoon piece, from Laurie Taylor, on why Karl Marx would not be appointed to a post in an economics department at a university today.  Whilst clearing the accumulated paperwork of many years in my room I recently came across a similar piece entitled 'Why God would not be given tenure.'  It originates, I believe, in Canada and, like the piece on Karl Marx, provides a comment on the expectations made of academics today - to produce short articles rather than long books, to be able to cite immediate impacts, to produce replicable research findings and so on.  Perhaps the big picture analysis from a great thinker, distilled over many years of scholarship and reflection,  is no longer compatible with the modern university.  Here are some of the elements relating to God's failed application for a permanent position in a university (with no offence intended to anyone with strong religious beliefs):

• he has only produced 1 major publication to date.
• Published in Hebrew rather than a major world language (preferably English)
• Inadequate provision of source references
• Not published in a refereed journal subject to peer review - appears to be some sort of self-publishing
• Questions are often asked over authorship
• The scientific community cannot replicate the results
• Did not get permission from an ethics committee to use human subjects
• Killed off some of his human subjects when experiments failed
• Expelled his first two students
• Did not post regular office hours or locations for personal advice: sometimes met in deserts or on mountaintops
• Set only 10 learning outcomes, yet these proved almost impossible to achieve