May 10, 2007
Class Notes: Seeing familiar landscapes differently
Class Title: Field Research: the Seattle Region (Geography 490), taught by Douglas Mercer
Description: In this class on the Seattle region, students can eat sushi, bike around Vashon Island or participate in an earthquake awareness meeting. Wherever and however they explore the Seattle region, the students justify their approach with a concept drawn from academic scholarship. Through their concept they see the city with new eyes, and the course Web site provides links to students’ reports of their explorations. Taken together, the reports offer a unique guidebook to the city that illustrates the value of seeing familiar landscapes differently. The course challenges students to consider alternative methods of thinking about the Northwest’s urban geography and what makes Seattle “authentic.”
The instructor says: “I want students to explore,” said Mercer, who holds a doctorate in geography from the UW. “For me, exploring is never just about a place, but also about the ideas we have about that place and ourselves. Exploring places is always also about exploring ideas.”
This exploration of ideas is at the heart of the class, which seeks to bridge the gap between the classroom and fieldwork. Students embark on field trips with Mercer around the city and its environs, called “Explores.” Later on in the course, the students design and execute their own Explore and then present their experiences to the class. At the end of the quarter, the Explores are placed in a guidebook that Mercer calls “The Phenomenal Guide to the Seattle Region.” The goal is to get his students to look at old places in new ways.
“I hope that when they are tourists somewhere else that they break out of the traditional tourist itinerary,” Mercer said. “This is not easy…it takes risk. But to my mind exploration, real exploring, entails some risk,” he said “They must risk feeling socially out-of-place, or risk having their ideas challenged, wanting to make the effort to see the world from perhaps an unobvious, ‘non-guidebooky’ way.”
Unexpected Experiences: “It’s fun to watch students put together an Explore on a topic they are really psyched about,” he said. One of Mercer’s favorite anecdotes involved a group that explored Broadway using the concept of ‘simultaneous perception,’ experimenting with the experience of turning their iPods on and off while walking to see how their observations differed.
“I know the course has succeeded when I see that look on someone’s face of having discovered something,” he said. “Some of the coolest discoveries are of places a person has gone [to] a million times. The look comes from seeing the same place differently, or a new place differently than they had anticipated. The look is a combination of surprise and curiosity mixed hopefully with some other potent reaction — maybe fear or love or distaste.”
Students say: “I took the class because I was interested in exploring Seattle and getting to know its regions and neighborhoods,” said Molly Deardorff, a student in the Community, Environment and Planning program in the Department of Urban Design and Planning. She said that while the course was rewarding, it was not easy, at least not at first.
“What I found most enjoyable about the class, was also what I had found to be most challenging and frustrating,” she said. “I consider myself to have a pretty analytical and logical mind.
“At the beginning, I couldn’t understand a thing Prof. Mercer was saying. I was so frustrated and remember saying to a classmate, ‘Just give me some math equations to work on, I can’t handle this!!’ But at one point, around the third or fourth week of the class, my mind just ‘let go’ and I began to understand thinking in ‘concepts’ and the value and technique of perspective and perspective thought.”
Aspasia Bartell, a junior majoring in international studies with a minor in geography, agreed.
“It was fun looking at places in Seattle from the point of view of a geographer,” she said. It was fun to go explore places I had never been to before, or even places I had been to. This class made you look at these places in a different way.”
Reading list: Students read from newspapers, journals and assigned texts, including such articles as “Performativity in practice: some recent work in cultural geography,” by Catherine Nash; “Return to traditional values? A case study of Slow Food,” by Peter Jones, Peter Shears, et al; and “Paradise Sold: what are you buying when you buy organic?” by Steven Shapin.
Assignments: As a field course, students spend the first half of the quarter visiting sites on Explores organized by Mercer and focused on a specific geographical concept or idea. In small groups during the second half of the course, the students create and report on their own Explores, and then go on and evaluate an Explore designed by another group.
Class Notes is a column devoted to interesting and offbeat classes at the UW. Compiled by UW Week Intern Will Mari
