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Instructional Development Award RecipientsSeveral undergraduate instructors who attended the 2004, 2005, 2006, or 2007 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. Steve WuhsAffiliation: Government and International Relations, University of Redlands Notable Achievements in His Own WordsThe SPACE program enriched my teaching and research work, and I can work through Territorial Politics to introduce my students to a spatial analysis of the global political economy. While I have a strong intellectual background in political economy, the development of this course would have been impossible without my participation in the 2007 SPACE workshop. My analytic training lies in statistical and qualitative methods, and while geography has frequently featured in rudimentary ways in my teaching (e.g., regional courses on Latin American politics) space itself had never figured as a prominent explanatory factor in my classes. This failing is indicative, I think, of broad deficiencies in my field of political science, wherein space, when considered, is normally treated as a container in which politics occurs rather than an influence on politics in its own right. That weakness and my interest in Redlands’ spatial initiative were the motivation for my participation in SPACE, which offered both the intellectual foundation for a more profound appreciation of space and place and the tools that I will employ in the instruction of this class. Context for WorkshopThe University of Redlands is currently undertaking a very deliberate effort to disseminate spatial thinking across its undergraduate curriculum, both through the infusion of existing courses with spatial elements and through the creation of new courses with those elements. This month I became the first faculty member to offer a new course under these auspices. My course, Territorial Politics: Territory, Politics, and Economy, introduces students to the dramatic transformations experienced by the global economy in recent decades and the political and spatial consequences of those transformations. While listed in the Government and International Relations Department, its emphasis and content are explicitly interdisciplinary, drawing from political science, economics, sociology, and geography to characterize globalization and understand how particular industries and their components have been affected by it. This is a pioneering course beyond that intellectual breadth, however. It is also the first social science course at Redlands to include a weekly lab session. Through those labs, students will develop both the ability to critically assess spatial and other visual representations of data and some facility with data manipulation and representation through GeoDa, ArcMap, and GoogleEarth. Questions Addressed in the CourseExcerpt from the Course Flier: If you like an intellectual challenge, want to gain marketable skills, and are interested in interdisciplinary work, please register for this exciting and innovative course. Course MaterialsSyllabus for Territorial Politics (20kb) Back to “Instructional Development Award Recipients”
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