After 20 years in the field, Meghan Cope has discovered that “a life-long commitment to the critical views of the world” is necessary to be a life-long learner.
A human geographer and professor at the University of Vermont, Cope spoke as a lecturer for UT’s “National Geography Awareness Week” on her projects with youth in Buffalo, New York from 2002 to 2006.
Cope and her team of student researchers set out to observe and record the racially diverse populations represented in the city’s west side and gauge the geographical impact on that community’s development under the Children’s Urban Geographies Project.
This community-centered learning, Cope said, is a research method that can and should be applied to any field of study, emphasizing the need for on-going reflection and evaluation in such projects.
“We were there to learn their geography,” Cope said of her students in Buffalo. “Some of the most difficulty I had was getting the other teachers to understand this, rather than the graduate students I was with.”
One step in that learning process, Cope explained, was an activity called “community visioning” where children were asked to visit empty lots in their Buffalo neighborhood and return with sketches with what they would want to see in place of the gray gravel.
“They were less whimsical than I expected,” Cope said. “It just proved that these kids are very savvy in their society’s reality. There were gardens with nutritious foods, homes for the elderly and ‘a school where both white and black children are happy.'”
Not only did this activity provide deeper understanding for Cope’s team, but she said it also laid the foundation for the broader challenge for her audience — to reexamine age as a social construct that shapes the habits and behavior of a particular community.
Matthew Kerr, a graduate student in geography, said that Cope’s emphasis on community-based learning and understanding age applies in his research on paleoclimates and paleoenvironments, a subdiscipline that combines physical geography with archaeological skills.
“That’s something I’ve thought of before, but in a very casual sense,” Kerr said. “About how we really do restrict our ideas of what certain age periods should be. It is something that archaeologists look at. It’s not what I look at, but there is an archaeology of youth and old age, and there is a geography of youth and old age.”
This construct of age, Cope explained, also carries over into suburban development and the trends she has studied in teens who live in environments more isolated than their urban peers.
Allison Ingram, a first year master’s student in geography, said the lecture made her think about her own life when growing up in New Jersey, a suburban environment that didn’t allow her to “really go anywhere.”
“It was such a pain to get places, and I didn’t realize how isolated I was,” Ingram said. “Now I live in Maplehurst, and I can walk to school everyday, I can walk everywhere. I have my car here, but that’s only for going to the grocery store. And I’m thinking in the future, ‘Do I want to live in a suburban area where you have to have a car? No, I don’t.'”
Mobility in suburb landscapes, like Ingram’s home in New Jersey, are now the focus of Cope’s attention and will become part of her 2007 study on youth mobility in Vermont and its relationship with social expectations in the average teenager’s life.
