Embodied teaching and learning through a large lecture: strategies for place-based pedagogies

Abstract

Lectures retain a key place in the timetables of many sites of higher education, despite critiques of lectures as unhelpful for learning, detrimental for student engagement and alienating for students and academics alike. In this chapter, we as university geography educators argue that being attentive to the specificities of context can focus our understanding about the challenges and possibilities of large lectures. Through looking to the context of the university, student community, and that of the respective educators themselves, we offer an understanding of the ways teaching and learning are embodied experiences which necessarily develop differently depending the person in question, and the dynamics of place. Rather than characterizing large classes solely through their pitfalls, we consider a range of strategies available to those teaching large lectures, emphasizing the potentials for student engagement that are possible.