Co-Teaching Historical Geography through French Landscapes

Abstract

The disciplines of geography and history have long been intertwined, classically so in the French tradition. Jules Michelet (1833), Elysee Reclus (1876–1894), and Paul Vidal de la Blache (1903) helped set the foundation for merging geography and history as a unified academic project that remains engrained in the French tradition of both disciplines, such as through the more contemporary works of Pierre Nora (1998, 2004) and Fernand Braudel (1988). Beyond France, geographers and historians have since continued the tradition, highlighting how each is best understood in relation to the other. Darby (1953) discusses historians embracing geography and geographers embracing history, highlighting how the two disciplines are so entangled that it can be “difficult to delimit the frontier between the two studies” (6). After all, “the geography of the present-day is but a thin layer that even at this moment is becoming history ... [and] the characteristics of different landscapes are the result not only of relief and soil and climate, but also of the utilization of these by successive generations of inhabitants” (Darby 1953, 6). Accordingly, landscape can serve as a teaching tool that inherently facilitates interdisciplinarity between geography and history. Landscape is also a powerful teaching tool for study abroad, whether for teaching students about ecosystems as they explore a new part of the world (Barton, Bruck, and Nelson 2009) or teaching them about practices in a new cultural context (e.g., Jokisch 2009). The inclusion of multiple and diverse landscapes explored in a study abroad program can increase the breadth and depth of student learning by highlighting how the destination country is not a single monolithic place, but a heterogeneous tapestry linked through larger-scale processes and shaped over the course of history to produce variable results. The study of different people and places also gives students a deeper understanding of the interdisciplinarity of geography and history that figures so prominently in studies of environmental history, social and cultural history, and heritage and memory (Ogborn 1999). Because landscapes are everywhere, they provide an omnipresent teaching tool that can enhance any interdisciplinary study abroad program.