THE ROLE OF LECTURES IN PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY AT KEELE Peter Knight, Physical Geography Course Director. e-mail: p.g.knight@esci.keele.ac.uk These notes are intended mainly for new students taking 1 st -year modules, but should be useful to everybody studying Physical Geography at Keele. How we study at University Lectures play a very important role in Physical Geography at Keele, even though they take up only a relatively small amount of your time. However, many students at the start of their university careers misunderstand the role of lectures within the course and therefore don t get the full benefit from them. Lectures usually work in a very different way from classes at school or college. It is very important that you understand how the lectures and the other activities in the Physical Geography course fit together, what you should get out of them, and how you should approach them. Lectures will take up only a small proportion of your time studying Physical Geography. You will also spend time in different types of class including practical classes, tutorials and field classes, and a large part of your study will be independent work based largely on recommended reading. Independent study, guided by your tutors and lecturers, will play a major role in your acquisition of essential factual and conceptual knowledge. Lectures are not the method by which you should expect to learn most of your factual information. However, lectures are extremely important. So what are the lectures for? What are lectures for? Most of the lectures are intended to focus your mind, point you towards the topics you should be studying in detail through independent reading, and inspire your interest. Lectures are like the glue that fixes together the different parts of your learning, bringing ideas together to form a coherent understanding.
Lectures DO: provide an organisational framework for the material that you are studying, help you identify key topics, controversies and case studies help to direct your independent reading, exploring and thinking give you an opportunity to follow up any difficult or controversial issues that you may have encountered in your reading, provide case studies, examples and context, give you an opportunity to ask questions and get answers, help to inspire your developing interest and enthusiasm for the subject, typically account for only a small proportion of the hours involved in any module. What are lectures not intended for? Lecturing is not always a very effective way of passing factual information between a speaker and an audience. That kind of straightforward information gathering can usually be done more effectively by other means including practical activities, reading and other types of classes. Therefore we don t use lectures as the main or sole method of telling you stuff. Lectures DO NOT: repeat the basic factual information that you can get out of the text books, provide all the material that you need to pass the module, save you having to read, explore and think for yourself. What is involved in a Lecture? The core of a typical Physical Geography lecture is a period of about 50 minutes of class engagement with a lecturer or a group of lecturers. This might involve some amount of straightforward lecturing where the lecturer addresses the group, but is likely also to also involve question-and-answer sessions (in both directions!), student buzz-group discussions and a range of other activities. Different lectures will be run in different ways to suit the needs of the group and the nature of the subject matter. Usually it is important that students take notes during the lecture to help them identify and remember the important points. You should write down big ideas, important
facts, specific advice or instructions, and any questions that occur to you. In addition to this face-to-face contact, there may also be a range of additional resources associated with each lecture, including set readings, self-assessment questions, and activities on the Virtual Learning Environment. Additional resources for each lecture on the VLE For most Physical Geography lectures the lecturer will put appropriate resources into a folder on the VLE to help you to do the work you need to do. These may include a basic set of lecture prompts, some questions based on the material covered in the lectures, set readings that you are expected to do, some questions based on that set reading, and a list of topics that you are expected to research independently. Exactly what is provided will depend on the nature of the individual lecture, and will be explained to you within each module. Lecture prompts: Where appropriate, lecturers will place a set of notes indicating the outline content of the lecture, possibly with some of the pictures, graphs, tables or other illustrations that are shown in the lecture. The idea of this is that you can print out these prompts before the lecture and bring them with you as a starting point for taking your own notes, and you can use them to save yourself copying down complex diagrams or tables during the lecture. NB: YOU NEED TO TAKE ADDITIONAL NOTES DURING THE LECTURE. The prompts are there to help you focus your thoughts and your notes, not to replace your thoughts or your own notes! The prompts will not usually cover every part of the lecture, so you must not rely on the prompts instead of taking notes during the lecture. Set Readings: For most lectures there will be one or more items of compulsory set reading. These may be listed individually within the VLE or in the module handbook, or they might be mentioned in the lecture itself: you must check. You must read set material carefully as it will provide you with important factual or conceptual content for the course. Questions based on the lecture content or set reading: For some lectures we will give you a few self-assessment questions. Some questions might be based specifically on the lecture to help you to focus your attention during the lecture and to help you pick out particular issues or details. You can use the questions to help you draw key points out of your own lecture notes as you organise them after the lecture. Other
questions may be based on the set reading, and will help you focus on the key issues within the set readings. You can look at the questions before you do the reading, then try to develop the answers in your mind as you read. After you have done the readings, make sure that you feel confident that you have an answer to the questions. If you are not sure, you can discuss with your friends, with your tutor, or with the lecturer. You can always ask questions in the lecture. Topics for independent study: For some lectures, especially in 1 st year, we will provide you with a set of associated topics that you must research independently. These may be technical terms, concepts, locations, significant individuals, or geographical examples. You should use sources such as the course text books, research journals, or discipline-specific dictionaries to find out about these topics. You should always check your findings in a number of different sources. It is important to keep up to date with the lecture-related resources on the VLE. The lecturers will assume that you have done the reading and researched the independent-study topics from the preceding lectures, and will base what they say in each lecture on the assumption that you have done the set work. If you have done the work you should find it easy to follow what the lecturer is talking about and keep up with the course. How to make the most of your lectures in Physical Geography Before each lecture: Look up the topic of the lecture in the course outline, and read anything you can find on that topic in one of the basic textbooks. Take notes of what you read and new information that you discover. Print out the lecture slides or prompts if they are available. You can use the prompts as a base and add on additional information that you found in the textbooks. Go through the prompts and identify any words you don't know or topics you haven't encountered before.
Look up the new words in the Dictionary of Physical Geography or some similar reference source. Add a brief definition or explanation to your notes, or perhaps on your printout of the prompts. Look up new topics in any of the basic textbooks or other books in the library and make yourself familiar with them. Take notes of new information that you discover If there are places you don't know about mentioned on the lecture prompts look them up in your atlas, on Google Earth, in the CIA World Factbook, or whichever source of general geographical information you prefer. If there are things you just can't find out about, make a note of them so that you can listen out for an explanation in the lecture, or ask the lecturer about afterwards. Organise the notes that you've taken and reflect on what you have learnt and what you are still unsure of. Write down any specific questions to which you still want answers. At each lecture: Arrive prepared and alert. Listen and think. Take notes on what is said. Annotate the lecture prompts with additional information provided by the lecturer. You have to listen carefully for important points. Listen out for answers to the questions you prepared before the lecture. Take additional notes of key points, and any interesting information or ideas that come up in the lecture. Do not imagine that everything you hear and think will just stick in your mind. Write it down or you will probably forget it when another interesting idea comes along in a few minutes! After the lecture: As soon as possible, find a few minutes to read through the notes you took in the lecture and write a short paragraph summarising the key points or major ideas. This will force your brain to process the information, which will help
reinforce your learning. The summary will later on help you with revision. Think of it like the abstract of a research paper. Organise the notes you took in the lecture and merge them with the notes you took before the lecture. If new words or topics arose in the lecture, go and look them up in the dictionary, textbook, etc, and write down what you learn about them. Look at any questions or terms-to-learn provided for the lecture on the VLE. Make sure you know the answer, and make sure you could EXPLAIN the answer to somebody who hadn't been at the lecture. Talk to friends about the lecture, and see if they picked up ideas that you missed. Add their ideas into your notes. Identify any specific reading that was recommended by the lecturer either in the slides or during the lecture, and go and read what was recommended. While doing so, try to relate what you read to the key points made in the lecture. Add material from your reading into your notes. Your notes will now include material from a range of sources, with the lecture providing a structure onto which you can hang all that material. At this stage many students like to reorganise their notes (which might have got a bit messy), make a neat copy and perhaps highlight particular points. Do whatever works well for your way of thinking. Look at the list of essay questions in the module handbook and in past exams, and think of ways in which the material associated with this lecture could be used in an answer to each essay question. Finally, if there are things you don't understand, or if you want more help, speak to the lecturer, your personal tutor, or the course director. Wider reading: What we listed above was a basic routine that will keep you on top of the core course material. If you still have time left, or if you want to take your study just a little bit further, you should explore wider literature about the topic of the lecture. Rather than just reading, reading and reading, remember to THINK about what you read and to relate everything to the framework of notes and other information that you have already accumulated. You will learn, understand
and remember things much better if you tie all your information together into a bigger picture. Journals such as "Progress in Physical Geography" (available on paper or online through Keele Library) carry review articles on specific topics that will carry you up towards more advanced levels of study. Browse through journals like this, looking for interesting articles. Textbooks on specific topics (glaciers, rivers, etc), rather than on the whole of Physical Geography, will enable you to focus more closely on topics of interest. Ask the lecturer for advice on advanced reading for specific topics. Read, think and just look at the world around you with a curious professional eye. Ask questions. Search for answers.