The University of Western Australia
Teaching
Teaching provides me with the opportunity to integrate theory and analysis into real world examples explored from various perspectives and paradigms. Teaching, mentoring and contributing to the intellectual growth of students is both rewarding and challenging in that I get to re-examine my own ideas and assumptions and gain new perspectives for my research. The below gives some current and past units.
This unit develops quantitative and qualitative techniques for urban and regional analysis, emphasizing international and transnational opportunities and pressures impinging regional development. This includes learning advanced methods for understanding local economic systems responding to global markets, and how this interfaces with the environment, society, land use, and policy. A field trip to Western Australian regional towns gives greater sense of the social, economic and environmental challenges and opportunities of regional towns against a backdrop of global influences and pressures.
I have taught this unit since 2020. It examines the range of contemporary economic, demographic, social and environmental issues and processes shaping the development of regional and rural areas from a geographical perspective. Adopting a multidisciplinary perspective, it focuses on the spatial interdependencies of development processes and what sustainable futures means for regional and rural areas. Students are introduced to quantitative and qualitative techniques to assess the structure and understand the dynamics of regional economic, social and demographic change; providing practical research and analytical skills for careers in regional development and planning.
The global economy shapes the lives of people living across the developed and developing worlds. This unit explores the complex and geographically uneven dynamics of the global economy and considers how this affects patterns of economic and social development. It includes an examination of how the world economy is affecting the geographies of economic activity, employment, quality of life, and social structures, and considers how disparate places are often interlinked and interdependent and what this means for policy and planning.
Some previous units
I ran this unit in 2019. This unit is designed to give students a unique perspective on contemporary geographical issues in a host country. In 2019, it was conducted in Japan, with a focus on how communities prepare, recover and manage disasters; and how Japan is meeting these challenges including those associated with an aging and a highly urbanised population. A pre-field trip course examining disasters and disaster response in Australia provided a comparison. In Japan, we explored contemporary environmental, economic, urban and governance issues in a variety of landscapes from heavily urbanised areas to sparsely populated rural ones to flatlands, oceans, mountains and lakes.
I taught this unit in 2021 and 2022. This unit provided students with hands-on experience in field research, group work and leadership with an explicit focus on geographical and planning problems. It was a capstone unit for students completing the BA in Human Geography and Planning and BSc in Geographical Sciences. It provided an opportunity to put into action the knowledge, ideas and practical skills that students had acquired over the time studying at UWA. The unit was for all students who had taken geography courses and wanted to complement their studies in related disciplines, as an advanced undergraduate unit it allowed students to build job-ready skills across the physical sciences and in planning and policy.
I taught this unit from 2012 to 2023. The unit taught quantitative and qualitative techniques for urban and regional analysis, including advanced methods for understanding economic systems and how they interface with the environment, social structure, demography and land use. Training was provided in modelling, social and economic indicators, population forecasting, and advanced policy analysis. There was a field trip to Western Australian Wheatbelt towns to understand the challenges and opportunities of regional Australian towns.