Paul Knox:
Authoring for students on two continents

When Prentice Hall asked Knox to write an introductory book on human geography, he wasn't interested. Then he thought of how much the world was changing and that there were no textbooks to address those changes. He changed his mind. "The reason for doing textbooks is to be closely connected with teaching," he said. "I really thought students deserved something better."

So, he said, that's why he "took a crack at" writing Human Geography: Places and Regions in Global Context, which turned out to be a hit. The book, which he co-wrote with University of Arizona professor Sallie Marston in 1997, won a Text and Academic Authors Texty excellence award in 1999. The judges called it a "rich and multi-layered text that offers a wide variety of approaches to teaching about geography and culture. It makes the necessary connections: culture, maps, ideas."

Knox said he'd like to think the book won a Texty because of the impact their fresh approach and the elevated writing. "We haven't compromised the writing as much as is sometimes encouraged by publishers," Knox said. Although an introductory textbook, it is written at a higher level. "People always point that out and then say, 'but that's OK because students can handle it." Knox said winning the Texty was "surprising, gratifying, unexpected and very welcome. I know there are a lot of books published every year. It's nice that a book from a minority discipline like human geography won an award like this. It may help just a tiny bit to make people more aware of the subject."

Places and Regions in Global Context Knox said, is organized around globalization, the "macro long-term, big picture" view of change around the world. Rather than seeing the world as a "mosaic of intrinsically different, funny-looking people in different get-ups with different languages and habits," he said, he and Marston attempted to present to the student a view of the world as an increasingly more tight-knit system politically and economically. "Within that framework the important structure is core affluent countries, and peripheral countries, both geographically and culturally," he said. "The central tenet there is that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and there's a structural relationship between the two." After that, he said, the book is organized a little more traditionally along the disciplinary themes -- political, economic, urban, cultural -- chapter-by-chapter.

The book is in color, something that is usually frowned upon in the United Kingdom, where Knox lived until moving to the United States in 1985 to teach at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He's now dean of the architecture and urban studies. In Britain, said Knox, color denotes a more beginning level with more superficial content. It was this "suffocatingly rigid and hierarchical" attitude within academia that made him want to move to the United States. He taught at the University of Wisconsin as a visitor in 1981 and came to Virginia Tech to stay in 1985. "The work environment in the U.S. is far superior to what it was in Britain at the time," Knox said. "Britain was suffering from a conservative regime, and wasn't very interested in higher education. Professionally, the U.S. is more open."

Teaching in the United States is very different than teaching in Britain, Knox said. "In the U.S. you walk into a classroom and you have 100 percent of your capital intact and you either keep it and build on it or you lose it if you're not a good teacher," he said. "In Britain you have zero, or at best 10 percent and you have to build it up from there. There's nothing some students like more than if the teacher comes in and makes an idiot of him or herself." Knox, who has won several teaching awards, says the honors probably reflect the respect he gives students. "I don't necessarily assume that they are eager to hear what I have to tell them just because they are enrolled in my class," he said. "I don't assume that what I find gripping is what they'll find gripping. I equally don't assume that they are needed to be spoon fed. If you set expectations high, the students will respond well to that. But you don't want to set expectations so high that it's like a boot camp. You have to do it in a way that the expectations come from them rather than you. I know I wasn't a good teacher when I started. That's why I'm always surprised that it worked out."

Knox said he hadn't planned to teach. He really didn't know what he wanted to do. He earned a bachelor's degree in geography in 1969 and a doctorate in geography in 1972 from the University of Sheffield in England. He had originally wanted to study architecture or planning but was nervous that after five or six years he wouldn't want to do the same thing. "I thought geography was broader," he said. "It covers the people and the environment; pretty much everything from one point to another if you wanted it to. So I thought it would be flexible, keep my options open. I don't know that I can claim I did a lot of thinking about it. It just had an intrinsic appeal because it was about people and places." He said he surprised himself and others by doing well enough as an undergrad to qualify for a graduate research assistantship. "That was better than working as far as I was concerned," Knox said. In the beginning, research was what was interesting, he said, and teaching was the price you had to pay to do that. "It took a number of years as a faculty member in Britain to learn to teach and to enjoy teaching," he said. "By that time I guess I had come at the subject matter in my own way. I wanted to convey it more than just to my own students. That's how I got talked into doing my first couple of projects."

In addition to Places and Regions in Global Context, Knox has written two other textbooks, The Geography of the World-Economy, and Urban Social Geography. Both in their third edition in 1998, and three professional books: The Geography of Western Europe: A Socio-Economic Survey in 1984; Geography and Inequality in 1977; and Social Well-Being: A Spatial Perspective in 1975. He has also edited four professional books: World Cities in a World-System in 1995; The Restless Urban Landscape in 1993; The Design Professions and the Built Environment in 1988; Public Service Provision and Urban Development in 1984.

Urban Social Geography, Knox said, has been very widely adopted in the Britain, at one point adopted by 90 to 95 percent of universities. It's a good for a book with a smaller, more specialized market, he said. "While in its first edition, it cast a more interdisciplinary net around the subject matter and wrestled it into something that meant something to urban geographers," he said. "So again, it was because I was not happy with what was being done traditionally and what was being offered to students, that I wrote the book. And for me, doing the book as a junior teacher, was a great way to do more reading and learning about the subject."

What makes a good textbook? Knox lists these qualities:

• Clear structure and rationale: Introductory students, he said, are bombarded with so many things in their introductory courses that sometimes it might not be clear to them what's important. "Unless authors are careful, they can be so busy attracting the students' attention that they lose the fundamental message," he said.
• Appearance, layout and price. The appearance of a textbook, he said, is by no means insignificant. "I think many are insulting as well as appalling," he said. "They undershoot what the students are capable of handling."

When it came to writing, Knox was influenced by a former professor who set the example of just going ahead and doing it. "He had the attitude that the more projects you had going the more you would finish," he said. "A lot of people's conventional wisdom is that they can only do one thing at a time and his was sort of 'just do it.' I think I got a lot from that." He also learned a lot, he said, from working on the Human Geography text with Prentice Hall. "Many of my previous books were done for British publishers who tend to just copyedit what you give them," he said. "Prentice Hall had professionals on hand to check and query and polish everything and challenge you at every level. I learned a lot about the more detailed craft of writing from the development editors at Prentice-Hall."

Knox said his proudest professional accomplishments have come at different levels, different scales. He said the proudest moment of his professional career was the first time he received a teaching award. "I think that's because it's not something I'm naturally good at," he said. He is also proud of what he has been able to do as an administrator: helping others and changing the curriculum to give a particular emphasis to the whole cast of courses. "As a dean it's a great privilege to be able to have a whole series of degrees and all the courses within the degrees tilt a little more towards certain values: civic society, environmental sensitivity and social justice," he said. "That's really why I'm interested in teaching, because you can touch the lives of people who will then go out and touch the lives of others. I find it very powerful and very satisfying to have even small influences on that whole picture." He is also very proud of his Human Geography text. "Many of the people I have great respect for have adopted it for use in their classroom," he said. "That's not something I take at all lightly."

Knox was married to his wife Lynne in 1972. He has one daughter, Anne-Lise, 1980. He is interested in reading biographies and watching team sports like basketball and soccer.

— reported by Kim Pawlak, 1999