Geography asks three questions: Where is it? Why is it there? and So what?
The "it" can be just about anything, as Commonwealth Honors students in our department's Discovering Brockton First-Year Seminar discovered in the Fall 2019 semester. In this case, the inquiry into human and physical geography was at the scale of a nearby gateway city that we could visit during each week's class session.
The students met the university requirement for a writing-intensive seminar by continuing the physical field trips with written reactions. This creative group of students never failed to impress me with the wide variety of cogent insights they reached from a single shared experience.
I was very pleased when Brian Benson, one of the university's communications staff, asked to join us for one of our weekly outings. We agreed that a visit to Old Colony Planning Council was in order. Not only do the professional in this agency know a lot about the city and its surrounding communities, but many of them are geographers who have studied in our department. It was the perfect culmination of our semester's learning, and Benson's City Champions article gave a wider audience a glimpse of geography in action.
COVID19 note: I will spend the summer planning this course for Fall 2020 with most of the same field experiences plus a few I had use in earlier versions of the course and some new ones. I will be making contingency plans for online or social-distance versions of each activity.
Lagniappe
I was reminded to post this when I received the inaugural edition of the OCPC newsletter. It begins with a focus on regionalization, a term to which I have given considerable attention since moving to Massachusetts, a state with 351 independent cities and towns; an unknown number of school districts; and an abiding commitment to illusions of local control. It has been more than a decade ago that I made a strong case for formal regionalization in areas other than planning, and I had the good fortune to share my ideas with then-governor Deval Patrick. He agreed strongly, but found the fiefdoms by which water, police, fire, library, highway, school, and other services are delivered to be extremely resistant to change. The success of regional planning remains a rare exception, but even in that case, the cooperation across town lines is largely voluntary.
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| Photo: Brian Benson |
The students met the university requirement for a writing-intensive seminar by continuing the physical field trips with written reactions. This creative group of students never failed to impress me with the wide variety of cogent insights they reached from a single shared experience.
I was very pleased when Brian Benson, one of the university's communications staff, asked to join us for one of our weekly outings. We agreed that a visit to Old Colony Planning Council was in order. Not only do the professional in this agency know a lot about the city and its surrounding communities, but many of them are geographers who have studied in our department. It was the perfect culmination of our semester's learning, and Benson's City Champions article gave a wider audience a glimpse of geography in action.
COVID19 note: I will spend the summer planning this course for Fall 2020 with most of the same field experiences plus a few I had use in earlier versions of the course and some new ones. I will be making contingency plans for online or social-distance versions of each activity.
Lagniappe
I was reminded to post this when I received the inaugural edition of the OCPC newsletter. It begins with a focus on regionalization, a term to which I have given considerable attention since moving to Massachusetts, a state with 351 independent cities and towns; an unknown number of school districts; and an abiding commitment to illusions of local control. It has been more than a decade ago that I made a strong case for formal regionalization in areas other than planning, and I had the good fortune to share my ideas with then-governor Deval Patrick. He agreed strongly, but found the fiefdoms by which water, police, fire, library, highway, school, and other services are delivered to be extremely resistant to change. The success of regional planning remains a rare exception, but even in that case, the cooperation across town lines is largely voluntary.
