ABSTRACT
The quote above serves as a reminder that the development and dissemination of innovative curricula remain a challenge for geography educators for almost four decades after Peter Gould made his observation. Despite the efforts to re-vision, re-create and
rethink the curriculum in geographic education since the early 1970s, a great deal remains to be accomplished. Our primary concern in this article is to present a vision that deeply embeds opportunities within the geography curriculum for students to engage in self-directed learning, to think independently, to make more informed choices and achieve their academic and personal goals. This article provides specific examples of how ‘self-authorship’ can be successfully
fostered in geography curricula. Our overarching goal is to encourage geographers collectively to think about ways through which authentic student learning in geography classes and programs can lead students toward this goal. Self-authorship is based on a student’s “capacity to internally define a coherent belief system and identity that coordinates engagement in mutual relations with the larger world” (Baxter Magolda, 2004, p. xxii). It encourages students to balance external influences with their internally held beliefs and to engage in intense reflection of their own learning process. Typical skills associated with this stage of intellectual development include the ability to critically analyze and evaluate information, to view ‘known truths’ from multiple perspectives, to embrace diversity and ambiguity and to develop an independent learning capacity and their own voice. Although many of these ideas and aspirations are verymuch in line with current educational thought on the importance of greater levels of student autonomy and more experiential learning, selfauthorship as a concept was first discussed in the 1960s. In the past decade, it has gained increasing attention as the concept has been expanded, tested and refined, and there is now an extensive body of research supporting the concept (Baxter Magolda, 1992, 2001, 2006; Kegan, 1994; Hodge et al., 2007, 2008a, 2008b, 2009). Convincing evidence to support selfauthorship as a goal for intellectual development has recently been provided by Bekken and Marie (2007). In their discussion of a four-semester earth sustainability pilot project, they report that “a remarkable transformation in student development as evidenced by four snapshots of written reflective work over time that capture how the students conceptualize complexity and authority, whether they recognize fundamental assumptions and arguments, and how they apply or transfer disciplinary knowledge beyond disciplinary boundaries” (Bekken & Marie, 2007, p. 65) became evident. We offer ‘self-authorship’ as a guiding principle for curriculum reform and revision
efforts in geography. In this article, we examine what self-authorship could look like in geographic education and provide some suggestions for implementing this approach in geography classrooms and programs in the sections that follow. Our conceptual discussion of self-authorship is followed by a series of international case studies that provide examples of the approach embedded within higher education geography curricula. Each of these case studies provides a concrete example of an effective way to encourage students to understand, apply and create their own meanings through mastery of specific content and skills in geography. In addition, they illustrate the use of a holistic approach that addresses the affective as well as the cognitive dimensions of student development. In the final section of this article, we offer some preliminary conclusions and reflections that may point the way toward a greater role for self-authorship in geography education.
