Sallie Marston:
Offering a sophisticated theoretical reference

Marston said writing the book, Human Geography: Places and Regions in Global Context, has put her behind professionally by about a year or two -- which is how long it took her to write it. "It's had an impact on my movement through the ranks but I don't really care about that," she said. "I've never regretted doing the textbook, it's one of the best things I've ever done. That it is not highly rewarded in the larger academic community is really unimportant to me."

Two years ago, just after the book had been adopted at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Marston was attending the graduation ceremony at the University of Arizona. "One of my student's sisters was attending Santa Barbara and came up to me and said she wanted to tell me how much she loved my textbook," Marston said. "I thought, 'This is so great.' To have a student actually read the book and care about it meant more to me than to have a colleague come up to me and say 'I read your article and it was really good.' Those kinds of rewards are much more important I think than I ever imagined they would be. I thought my research would always be more important than my teaching but I now realize that each bring different but equally wonderful rewards."

Human Geography: Places and Regions in Global Context, was published in 1998. It won a Texty exellence AWard from Text and Academic Authors 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." Marston said she thinks the book won because of its new approach to the world. "We kind of turned the world upside down with this book," she said. "We used a different map projection -- called dymaxion projection in which the central point of reference is the Arctic and the continents are arrayed around the globe from the north outward," she said. "What we show with that projection is how close continents are to each other, how a different perspective on the world will give you a very different view of where you are in it and how you can and do interact with people and processes in other places."

Marston said she and Knox have tried to do with the book is to determine what students already know about the world -- globalization and places -- and capitalize on that by showing them that what they know actually has a sophisticated theoretical reference to it. "It's not just trivial knowledge," Marston said. "What we try to do in the book is to systemize what they know and enable them to not only to access that knowledge but also to begin to look around them and say, 'Oh, I understand now what is is I see out there in the world because I have this conceptual tool kit to help me understand globalization, or to help me understand that places matter, that geography is dynamic." Marston also feels that their textbook is a bit more theoretically challenging than the others on the market.

Challenge, though, Marston said, is one thing that makes a textbook good. "From my experience teaching from textbooks, I found that students get bored with them," she said. "Many are so repetitious." Another thing that makes a good textbook, she said, are concepts that have illustrations that are accessible; not just pictures, but textual illustrations that allow the concepts to be introduced and then give students three or four times to understand what they mean. "They see the concept in a picture, in a graph and then described textually," Marston said. "Authors have to give definitions, but also examples of those definitions. Students can then generalize from those examples to other situations beyond the classroom."

For Marston, writing doesn't come easily. "Writing is difficult for me," she said. "I'm not an easy writer. I just have to sit down and do it. Then three or four hours later I think 'that wasn't so bad'. Paul doesn't have that problem. In fact, he is always ahead of the game and I'm always a bit behind. "Paul is a wonderful motivator and a great person to work with," Marstons said. "I really enjoyed the experience."

Marston said she also learned a lot by working with publisher Prentice Hall. "They took us seriously as authors," she said. "They listened to us when we wanted to try unorthodox things. Sometimes our editor whould say something might not be well received, and we'd say we would still like to try it, and he'd let us. I have nothing but great things to say about Prentice Hall and the people we worked with."

Marston earned a bachelor's degree in geography and psychology from Clark University in 1974, a master's in geography in 1982 and a doctorate in geography in 1986, both from the University of Colorado. She enjoys geography, she said, because it's comprehensive. She doesn't have to stop at some arbitrary boundary for an explanation, she said, because unlike political science which has to stop at politics, or sociology that has to stop at society, geography allows you to cut across disciplines and get a more satisfying and comprehensive explanation. She began college studying psychology, but after taking a geography course decided to double major. "Psychology is about the individual and that was interesting but too limited to me," she said. Other disciplines seemed to limit what kinds of questions I could ask. Geography didn't."

Marston said she loves to travel and has been to every continent except Asia. She says she would like to travel more in Europe, which she finds interesting because of all the changes that have occurred since the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. She lives with her greyhound, Vinny, in Tucson, Arizona.

Now she's head of the geology department at Arizona.

— reported by Kim Pawlak, 1999