Caring about the Connections
My teaching philosophy is grounded in care and connection, two ideas that are, I believe, inseparable. To genuinely connect with a student, an idea, or a community is to care about it, and to care is to seek connection. As a geographer, I find this instinct reflected in Tobler's First Law: everything is connected to everything else, but nearby things are more connected than things that are far apart. My goal as an educator is to close that distance: between students and the material, between students and each other, between the classroom and the broader world they will go on to shape.
I have been fortunate throughout my own education to have had instructors who made that effort for me. They taught difficult technical concepts, but the hardest thing they taught me was through their modeling of what it looks like to invest in someone else's growth. George Evans once said, "Every student can learn, just not on the same day or the same way." That idea has guided my teaching across every context I have worked in, from undergraduate introductory courses to graduate seminars to professional GIS certificate programs. At each level, and with each student, the task is the same: care about the student and find the connection that makes the material click.
What follows is an account of how I pursue that task, organized around the different scales at which I try to build connection: with the material, with each other, with the institution, with the broader community, and with the future that students are moving toward.
Connection to the Material
The first and most fundamental connection is between a student and what they are learning. Students sense immediately when course content is generic or borrowed, and when an instructor has not invested in making the material relevant to them. In technical fields like GIS and spatial statistics, this disengagement is especially costly because the concepts are challenging enough without the added barrier of indifference.
Every course I teach is built around original labs and assignments that connect to things students actually understand and care about. In my Intermediate GIS course, I designed a lab where students mapped UFO sightings in Michigan across three time periods using three different software platforms. The students found it genuinely fun, and because many of them knew Michigan, they could interrogate the spatial patterns themselves rather than just executing steps. In another lab at the University of Richmond, students digitized roads from satellite imagery to contribute to the Amazon Borderlands Spatial Analysis Team (ABSAT), a research team led by a colleague in the Geography Department. Over four years, students for the assignment have mapped more than 20,000 kilometers of illegal logging roads in the Amazon Borderlands of Peru and Brazil. These are the moments when a difficult concept stops being a procedure to memorize and becomes something a student actually grasps.
I also recognize that students bring vastly different backgrounds into the classroom. Some arrive with prior technical experience; others are encountering spatial thinking for the first time. Some are navigating significant personal and economic pressures outside of class. Meeting students where they are means remaining genuinely curious about who each person is. I try to learn at least one meaningful fact about every student, whether that is a favorite team, a hobby, or a hometown, and find ways to weave those details into lectures and conversations. That small act of recognition tells a student that they are a person in this classroom, not just a seat.
Connection to Each Other
According to collaborative learning theory, learning in isolation is less effective than learning in community. Peer-to-peer exchange deepens understanding in ways that top-down instruction alone cannot achieve. I have seen this play out consistently across my courses, and I design with that in mind.
Every class session begins with a five-to-ten minute warm-up exercise. Students work in small groups to analyze a data visualization, critique a map, or discuss factors contributing to a problem. By the time the lecture begins, students have already talked with each other, engaged with the central ideas of the day, and established a shared reference point I can return to throughout class. Semester after semester, these warm-up exercises appear in student reviews as one of the most valued parts of the course.
The most common thing that shuts down participation is the fear of sounding uninformed or "dumb". I address this directly from the first day of class, telling students: "You are not allowed to judge what each other say or ask, but you can judge me all you want." I back this up with self-deprecating humor and by openly acknowledging my own gaps and mistakes. When students see that the instructor is not performing infallibility, they feel safer taking intellectual risks themselves.
Lab assignments are designed for collaboration rather than individual completion. Working through a difficult spatial analysis problem together requires students to articulate their thinking, identify where their understanding breaks down, and sometimes receive an explanation from a peer that lands differently than it would coming from me. I did not change this requirement when my Intermediate GIS course moved online in Fall 2020. Instead, I used Zoom breakout rooms to preserve the warm-up structure and built a Slack workspace where students could message each other, ask questions in assignment-specific channels, and respond to one another's posts. Students frequently answered each other's questions faster than my TA or I could. Several students told me at the end of that semester that my course was one of the few that made them feel less isolated from their peers during a genuinely isolating period.
Students also connect with each other through final group projects. Students identify a question or problem they care about and apply the tools and methods from the course to address it, then present their work to the class. Some projects have addressed social and environmental justice; others have mapped music festival logistics. The topic matters less than the fact that the student chose it. When someone is working on something they find meaningful, even technically demanding work stops feeling like a barrier, and the collaboration required to get there often becomes one of the strongest bonds students form across the semester.
Connection to the Institution
One thing I want every student to leave my courses with is a sense of belonging to the institution they are part of and an understanding of what that institution does for them and what they might someday do for it. This kind of connection is often taken for granted, but it does not happen automatically. It has to be intentional.
One small way I do this is by ending each lecture with a round of "Guess the Famous Alumni." I highlight a lesser-known graduate, drawn from a wide range of races, ethnicities, and professional paths, and invite students to guess who it is. At the University of Richmond, all the students knew the rapper Lil Dicky, but very few knew Dr. Alice Turner Schafer, the first female math major on campus, who went on to found what became a leading organization for women in mathematics (Association for Women in Mathematics). Students can see themselves in these alumni and connect with the institution through people who reflect their own interests and identities, not just athletes and celebrities.
More substantially, my Cartography and Spatial Data Visualization course partners directly with the Admissions, Alumni Relations, and Annual Giving offices at the University of Richmond. Students produce real maps for real audiences, not exercises or simulations, but deliverables that these offices actually use. At the end of the semester, students present their work at an event where representatives from each office speak about the importance of their missions. Students leave that presentation having done professional work, having been seen doing it, and having learned something concrete about why institutional giving and alumni engagement matter. The effects have been measurable: in UR's 2025 Annual Giving Day, the Geography Department placed second in total number of donors, an outcome I attribute in part to students who left that course understanding why those contributions matter.
I have extended this model to other departments and offices across campus, developing mapping projects that give students a reason to engage with parts of the university they might never otherwise encounter. Geography is, among other things, a discipline that connects things, and I try to use it that way.
Connection to the Community
The classroom is not the limit of education. Some of the most significant learning I have witnessed has happened when students leave campus, encounter real places and real problems, and are asked to bring their skills to bear on something that matters to people beyond the university.
My community-engaged research in Richmond's Jackson Ward neighborhood has become one of the most meaningful extensions of this principle. Students have collected urban heat data, built maps that surfaced patterns of environmental inequity, and presented findings to community partners. That work contributed directly to tree planting efforts organized by the Historic Jackson Ward Association, a concrete, visible outcome that students can point to and say: I did that, and it changed something. Every one of those students will return to Richmond someday and stop by to see how those trees are growing. It is planting seeds that last, both literally and metaphorically.
Fieldwork of all kinds plays a role in this. Sending students out to collect WiFi speed data, map waste receptacles around campus, conduct intercept surveys, or document spatial features of their environment gives them a relationship with data that is simply not available when everything comes pre-packaged in a lab file. They understand the limitations of the data because they produced it. They care about the analysis because they did the collection.
Community connection also means being honest with students about what geography can and cannot do, and about the ethical dimensions of working with data about real places and real people. I try to model that seriousness while keeping the work from becoming abstract. The goal is students who are technically capable and also thoughtful about what they are doing with those capabilities.
Connection to Their Future
A college education represents an enormous investment, financial, temporal, and personal. I take that seriously, and one way I show it is through caring explicitly about where students are going after they leave my courses.
In every class I teach, students have at least one assignment that directly builds their professional materials. They submit a resume and cover letter for a job or internship of their choosing, and I return detailed feedback with tracked changes. For some students, this is the first time anyone has looked critically at their professional materials. For others, it is a chance to sharpen something they have already been developing. Either way, the act of doing it signals that I believe their career trajectory is a legitimate part of what a course can address.
I also design coursework around the problems that employers in GIS, data science, environmental planning, and related fields are actually trying to solve. I consult with professional contacts and colleagues in industry to make sure that what students are doing in labs resembles what they would be asked to do on the job. This serves two purposes: it gives students a realistic sense of what different career paths look like, and it gives them something concrete to talk about in interviews, not "I took a GIS or Urban Planning course" but "I worked through a problem that looks a lot like what you are describing." At Michigan State, more than 40% of students in two semesters of my Intermediate GIS course received an internship, job offer, or graduate school admission in the field during or immediately after the class, using materials they produced as course assignments. At the University of Richmond, students in my Advanced GIS course have gone on to positions as conservation cartographers, environmental consultants, and urban planners.
When there is a genuine match between a student's interests and one of my professional contacts, I make the introduction directly. I am transparent with students about my own early-career struggles. I left my undergraduate program without a clear sense of what I could do or how to talk about it in an interview, and I do not want that to be anyone else's experience if I can help it. I care about the students and helping those students connect what they are doing in the classroom or during their undergraduate/graduate education to their future career.
Connection That Endures
The relationships I value most in my teaching life are the ones that did not end when the semester did. At the close of every course, I tell students that if they ever need anything, a reference, a consultation, a sounding board, they should reach out. Many of them do, sometimes months or years later.
They typically reach out for one of two reasons: they need help with a research or analytical problem, or they need mentorship on a professional decision. I have consulted on projects in forestry, sociology, fish and wildlife management, community sustainability, ecology, and urban planning, among others. I have helped students navigate graduate school applications, job searches, and career transitions. Of the 35 students I have mentored through graduate school applications, 32 received fully funded positions; the three who did not were admitted to Ivy League programs where funding structures work differently, which is a fine problem to have.
The only thing I ask in return is that when they are in a position to help someone else, they do. I think of this as the most honest version of what education is supposed to be: not a transaction, but a transmission, something passed forward, person to person, across time.
Connecting It All Together
My teaching philosophy begins and ends with the belief that connection is the mechanism through which learning happens. When a student connects with the material, with their peers, with their institution, with their community, and with their own future, the difficult work of mastering technical and conceptual challenges becomes not just possible but meaningful. Google Scholar uses the phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants" to describe how new knowledge builds on what came before. I borrow that phrase to describe my own formation as a teacher. The educators who shaped me most were those who closed the distance between us, who made me feel seen, challenged, and supported all at once. In every course I teach and every student I work with, I am trying to do the same thing through extending that care and focusing on the connections.
Kyle James Redican (Ph.D.)