Teaching is much more than just conveying information from the lecturer to students. Nowadays students are anyhow over-fed with information, through a multitude of different channels and media., so that they cannot see the wood for the trees anymore. Real teaching is an experience and a two or multiple way communication process. It is a communal and shared feeling. Especially during the Covid-19 period, when everything was just online and at a distance, we noticed the difference and what was missing. You cannot study the environment and sense of places only from books and from behind the screen. Even though we also embrace the fascinating possibilities of new digital tools in teaching, we are now also very happy to slowly but surely get back to an almost normal teaching situation, where we can feel again the personal engagement of both lecturers and students with each other and with the environment and our joint passion for the geography of places. We very much hope to be able to go into the field with our students again and have excursions together which also creates dense bonds between the learners and the teachers. Since this is certainly also my and our mission in teaching geography, we are also very proud, that one of our appreciated colleagues and Urban geographer, Dr Rianne van Melik, of our Geography Group has now received the well deserved Radboud University Teaching Award (click on the picture to view the short video about Rianne van Melik).
But this is not just about Rianne, but about the passion for teaching, which we try to cherish in our Human Geography group as a whole. The relation to our students is something we take very seriously. So this is not about fulfilling teaching obligations or about following the directives of the educational centre of the university, but about really having a passion for teaching and an engagement with the curiosity of our students.