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Welcome to the GFDA

The Geography Faculty Development Alliance is a long-term, broad-based project to improve the learning and teaching of geography in higher education. The aim is to provide early career faculty and advanced doctoral students with the theoretical and practical knowledge needed to excel in the lecture hall, seminar room, and laboratory. Key objectives of the project are to foster a culture of support and success for early career faculty, to help them understand the fundamental interconnections between their teaching and research, and to advance the scholarship of teaching and learning across the entire discipline.

Given these goals, this website has been designed to act as a repository for syllabi and teaching resources. We hope it will encourage lecturers and faculty to share ideas and resources across university campuses. If you have resources to share, please email them to Kate Swanson at San Diego State University. The more resources we post, the more we can build upon each other's knowledge and experience.

Beyond this website, the GFDA project involves several components: summer workshops, follow-up seminars, panel discussions, and paper sessions at the annual meetings of the Association of American Geographers and the National Council for Geographic Education. There is also a longitudinal evaluation and research component to consider the value of the training to early career faculty during the tenure review process. A final component involves publishing the workshop materials as a stand-alone course for use in graduate geography programs. For more information on the GFDA, please contact Kenneth Foote at University of Connecticut.

The statements found on this page/site are for informational purposes only. While every effort is made to ensure that this information is up to date and accurate, official information can be found in the university publications.