Instructional Development Award Recipients

Several undergraduate instructors who attended the 2004 or 2005 SPACE workshops were awarded funds to continue their efforts in integrating spatial analysis into their course curriculums. These pages showcase their achievements. See the full recipient list.

Dr. Claude Barnes and Laurie Garo

Affiliations: Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, North Carolina A&T State University; Department of Geography and Earth Sciences, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Workshop Attended: Spatial Analysis for the Undergraduate Social Science Curriculum, UCSB
Accomplishment:Dr. Claude Barnes and Laurie Garo created new GIS for Social Science courses at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in North Carolina. The courses incorporated GIS technology, and spatial analytical thinking, and used teaching materials conceived while participating in the SPACE workshop.

Notable Achievements in Their Own Words

Discussions on difficulties of introducing GIS, both technologically (hardware/software installation and maintenance) and in teaching it without losing sight of its analytical capabilities, were insightful...
Dr. Claude Barnes and
Laurie Garo

About the course:
GIS in Criminology for Social Sciences at Johnson C. Smith University was designed by Laurie Garo for purposes of teaching criminology students how to spatially analyze crime and related data (demographic, socio-economic, education, locations of sites where crimes take place, etc.). It was taught for the first time in 2005, and the syllabus and all materials were created specifically for the course. The students had no experience with GIS so the labs were created to teach basic GIS skills as well as spatial analysis for criminology. Course content included the lab exercises that were initially conceived of at the SPACE workshop, whereby students would map drug arrests by four different methods (point locations, hot spots, total arrests per neighborhood, and the drug arrest rate per neighborhood) and compare the information content and limitations in each method. Students also collected crime data with GPS, created and queried crime databases, learned map design, and prepared bi-variate map overlays to show potential correlations between locations of crime and socio-economic conditions e.g., child neglect and the high school dropout rate. In addition to the GIS exercises, students carried out a final project in which they analyzed spatial patterns for selected crimes in three neighborhoods and were asked to discuss the potential factors contributing to those crime patterns based on evidence mapped with GIS. In all exercises, students are asked to discuss the spatial patterns they saw, and to think about the limitations of the analysis methods being used and what additional data and/or techniques might be needed.
A similar course design approach was used for the course GIS for Social Sciences by Claude Barnes (Dept of Political Science and Criminal Justice) at North Carolina A&T State University.

Course Materials

Course descriptions follow:

GIS for Social Sciences at North Carolina A & T University, taught by Dr. Claude Barnes
Student Project: GIS in Criminology for Social Sciences Criminology majors at Johnson C. Smith University, taught by Laurie Garo

Future Participation

Dr. Barnes and Laurie Garo will present a paper based on their experiences in developing and teaching these courses at the Thirteenth National HBCU Faculty Development Symposium, October 19-21, 2006 in Houston, Texas.

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