Teaching
Amanda Todd has been teaching geography courses for 18 years. She teaches students to see and understand how geography impacts their daily lives, through purchases made, as tourist visiting places, and as citizens in local and global communities. She also strives to show how geography can be beneficial knowledge to have within many different career fields, as she has majors and non-majors in her classes.
In classes with Amanda, students receive traditional lectures, watch documentaries, and read articles or book chapters on topics related to the course. She also offers choices within assignments. The students can select the culture, region, or particular topic that interest them personally, or that would connect in with their future career. She also takes the students outside for various activities depending upon the course. These activities may include outside observation and awareness exercises, collecting soil samples, or building a labyrinth.
Specialty Geography Courses:
Spiritual Landscapes
Sacred Spaces, Sacred Paths
Sacred Spaces, Sacred Paths
This course covers the concepts of topophilia, biophilia, geophilia, and spiritual landscapes. The Spiritual Landscape course covers natural areas (geologic formations, mountains, rivers, waterfalls, etc.) Through the modern lenses of tourism impacts and economic development to historical accounts of ceremonial uses of sites, archeological findings, and mythology associated with sites and their uses today, students explore and learn how these places emanate power and why for different cultures. This course is taught in the Fall Semester online and has been Certified by the Coastal Office of Online Learning.
Sacred Spaces, Sacred Paths
Sacred Spaces, Sacred Paths
Sacred Spaces, Sacred Paths
This course covers sacred sites, sacred geographical areas, and sacred paths (pilgrimages). The Sacred Spaces, Sacred Paths course covers built environments in areas attributed with spiritual or sacred power and or energies (i.e., temples, churches, cemeteries, shrines, and labyrinths.) This course also covers how and why people create sacred space through understanding orientation in space and the local landscape. The students in this class design and build a labyrinth. Watch the videos below that highlight the construction of the labyrinth and student perspectives of the experiential learning opportunity.
Additional Anthropology & Geography Courses:
Cultures and Environments
Cultures and Environments
Cultures and Environments
This course covers the human-environment interaction through time and space as a cross-listed course between Geography and Anthropology. The way Amanda approaches the course is based upon assessing the socio-cultural anthropological aspects of various case studies through elements of our earth. These elements may include topics related to: Fire, Water, Wind, Stone, Plants, Animals, and Humans. Topics vary by semester. The course is taught Spring and Fall Semesters.
Human Landscapes
Cultures and Environments
Cultures and Environments
This course explores the topics of human-environment interactions through the lenses of cultural, political, and spiritual ecologies. Topics may include population, tourism, and development; construction of roads and stream restoration/mitigation projects; and urban flooding issues. Pre-req for this course is Cultures and Environments. This course is offered every Fall Semester and involves a group project for completing a technical report for a section of campus.
Myth, Ritual, and Magic
Cultures and Environments
Myth, Ritual, and Magic
This course covers ancient & historical cultures’ supernatural beliefs, ritual practices, and mystical symbolism. Topics may include: witchcraft, altered states of consciousness, shamans, divination, magic, death rituals, UFO religions, and cult objects. We approach these topics through the study of folklore, mythology, historical, and archaeological evidence.
Speaking Engagements
Amanda enjoys sharing different perspectives and new topics to professionals interested in practices and tools that can help us navigate busy lives today. Through the integration of nature, cultures, and spiritual beliefs/practices she has studied and researched around the world, she's able to give inspiring talks that motivate change and action. Most recently at a Rotary luncheon talk, the Rotary Club decided to build a labyrinth in a park. At the same talk, a local church decided to initiate securing the funds in building a labyrinth at a local hospice house.