We Are All Makers: The Method of Keyword Selection in Teaching and Learning Human Geography

This chapter describes a new teaching method for a university geography course based on the core idea that everyone should be “makers” rather than passive learners. After enough teaching and learning preparation, freshman students in a Chinese university were asked to select keywords on the topic “What is human geography?” Nearly half of the selected keywords were different from what they had learned previously. They were linked to the frontier of human geography, to some extent, demonstrating that students were “makers.” The result shows the method of keyword selection and the idea that “we are all makers” can help the teacher and students reconstruct the process of teaching and learning, even for newcomers to the field. Thus, students could learn more autonomously and efficiently. At the same time, they would try to make new progress.