Yesterday was the last lecture of new material on my level 3 module Territory and Geopolitics (handbook/reading list here). There is a revision lecture after the Easter break. Obviously it’s for those who took the class to say how it went, but unless my ability to gauge a student audience is completely off, then I think it went fairly well. Teaching it was frequently my highlight of the week.

The first term is largely historical, working through a range of time periods and looking at the relation between place and power, out of which things approaching what we now call territory and geopolitics emerged. So there were lectures on Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Early Modern Europe, the Birth of the Nation State, and Colonialism. In term 2 we shifted to more contemporary material, looking at some themes – Boundaries, Frontiers and Maps – and some 20th century examples including the inter-war period, World War II, the Cold War, Globalisation, Gulf War 1991, Humanitarian Intervention and the ‘War on Terror’. Yesterday I tried to tie up some themes and open up some others with a lecture on Security, Resources and Environment. In my first two years at Durham (2002-03; 2003-04) I taught a level 2 module called Territory and Politics, and there was, especially in the first term some re-use of material, though the lecture component was longer each week so a lot of stuff was added. Term 2 was largely new material.

I taught the class in one three-hour session, the first part a lecture, then after a short break around 90-100 minutes in, half the class came back for a seminar. About 60 students took the class, so 30 students in the seminar meant it was possible to have much more discussion. I usually got them into groups of 4 or 5, put up some discussion questions and then with a colleague – either John Donaldson or Andrew Burridge from the department’s International Boundaries Research Unit – went round the groups listening in, contributing to the discussion or answering questions. Given each individual student only came every other week the seminar had to cover two lectures worth of material, but it did mean we got to know the students in much smaller groups and had an ongoing sense of how they were engaging with the material. Unfortunately time-tabling restrictions next year mean I cannot have a three-hour slot and will need to have 2 hours plus 1 hour. I’m hoping they can at least be on the same day, and in that sequence, otherwise it will really mess up the teaching method.

Given the subject matter, there is obvious linkage to my research over the past several years, especially The Birth of Territory and Terror and Territory. But I taught on these subjects (though not quite in this way) before either book was written, and to some extent the teaching inspired the research, rather than just vice versa. Obviously some of the research fed back into the lectures, especially this year, but there was no sense from my side that I was merely teaching my books.

I put the Powerpoint slides up a few days before each lecture, and was pleased to see that most students looked at these in advance, perhaps printed them off, and still came to the lecture. I don’t use separate notes, but there is a lot of material in the lecture that isn’t just reading the slides. The slides tend to have maps, quotes, dates, examples, etc. and many students wrote notes onto printouts of the slides. The advantage of this is that nothing that goes onto the screen needs to be written down – no trying to copy down a quote, for example – but rather they can write commentary on the quote, or whatever, either based on what I say or, better, what they think about it. I used video – i.e. films or clips from the web – in a way I’ve not before. I’ll try to develop that further in future years.

As I’ve said before, going back to teaching was not what worried me after the years on a fellowship. It was the administration that goes with it. And yes, this meant there were – to my mind unnecessary – restrictions on things. To take the most striking example, the exam which the students will sit in May had to be be set in November. So I was teaching the class with one eye on a pre-set exam, instead of setting an exam when the class had be taught. And in November I had to set three exams – a mock, the May exam, and a resit for September (without yet knowing if anyone would actually need to take this). These have to go through so many layers of checking – internal ‘nitpickers’ committee (I’m not joking, it really is called that) and potentially back to me; external examiners and potentially back to me; Board of examiners meeting… – that November becomes the setting deadline. Does this genuinely improve the quality of teaching or the way students are assessed? I am not at all convinced.

Equally I have to specify, in advance, what each session will be on. Okay, this sounds good practice. But it has to be done so far in advance that I had to specify the teaching for next year before I’d taught more than a few sessions of this year. So there is precious little room for manoeuvre if, during the course of this year, I realised that things were not structured right, a different session would be better, etc. Or, obviously, to react to events, other than within the framework I’d already set up. Again, I’m not convinced that actually benefits the students.

But overall it was an enjoyable experience, and alongside the teaching I did on the level 2 Political Geography module and the level 3 Theory and Geography one a good return to teaching after a few years away. (You can find the reading lists for my lectures for those modules here and here.)