Earth Week with BSU Geography

Earth Week is a geographic holiday that our department celebrated in several ways. One of these was to bring EarthView and a couple of our National Geographic floor maps to the BSU Kelly Gym for its first public viewing since March 2020 -- when we hosted visitors from Cape Verde and Russia in the same space.

BSU students and their instructor learning about geography and geographic education on their
way to their physical-education class. One of the students remembered seeing the EarthView
globe during her middle-school days in Brockton!
Photo credit: Michael Sandy, BSU Study Abroad

For this event, we brought together a great team, part of which is shown above. We brought together the trio of Emeritus Professor Dr. Vernon Domingo, Professor James Hayes-Bohanan (above center), and alumnus Kevin Bean (above right). 

We were also joined by Allison Morrissey, who had her debut as a Wrangler, but who had seen EarthView as a student at her middle school in Braintree. We are delighted to have Allison on board!

Making a Mark on the World

 In geography, the real world is a big part of what we do.

We are grateful that the American Association of Geographers (of which our faculty are long-time members) is finding creative ways to get the word out. Whether through a single course, an undergraduate minor, or one or more degrees -- the study of geography has never been more timely!

Honors and Other Distinctions

A number of distinct pathways to academic honors are available to students in the Department of Geography at Bridgewater State University. This post is intended to assist students and advisors in understanding the differences among them. The four major kinds of honors are Latin, Greek, Departmental, and Commonwealth. 

At the end of this post are some additional opportunities the Geography Department offers for learning with distinction!

Image: WoodenCraftsBG

Latin -- strong grades

This is perhaps the best known of all university honors -- whereby a Latin phrase appears on the final transcript and in the graduation commencement program according to the student's total grade-point average (GPA):

• cum laude (GPA of 3.3 to 3.59)
• magna cum laude (3.6 to 3.79)
• summa cum laude (3.8 or higher)

Individual departments are not involved in this recognition. Important details are in the "Graduation With Honors" section of the Registrar's Awarding of Undergraduate Degrees page.

Greek -- our society

Geography students at BSU including majors, minors, and others with significant coursework in geography -- are eligible to join the Eta Nu chapter of Gamma Theta Upsilon. The international  honorary society for geographers, GTU was established in 1928; the Eta Nu chapter began in 1988. All of our full-time professors and many of our alumni are members. 

Membership in GTU is open to any student who demonstrates commitment to and excellence in geography by meeting these criteria:

• At least 3 courses completed in geography
• At least 3 semesters (or equivalent) of full-time student status
• At least 3.3 GPA in Geography

Application forms are available from Dr. Hayes-Bohanan (jhayesboh@bridgew.edu) and induction celebration are held annually. Lifetime membership dues of $40 are paid at the time of initiation; a generous BSU alumnus currently pays this fee on behalf of Eta Nu inductees.

Departmental -- your project

In coordination with the BSU Honors Program, the Geography Department provides eligible geography students the opportunity to earn Departmental Honors by completing a thesis project and additional honors credits. The departmental honors designation requires 9 credits of honors work (typically over two semesters) and some advanced planning. The application process is completed with Dr. Hayes-Bohanan (jhayesboh@bridgew.edu) in his capacity as Honors Chair, and he also coordinates the acceptance of proposals and scheduling of thesis defense sessions. But any full-time professor in the department may serve as the thesis mentor.

Commonwealth Honors -- straight out of high school

The Geography Department participates in Commonwealth Honors by offering some of the courses that are open only to students in that campus-wide program. If you are reading this prior to BSU admission, please have a look at the program requirements. We look forward to having you in the 100- and 200-level geography courses for which you would be eligible.

Recently, these have included general introductory courses such as environmental and physical geography as well as more focused seminars and colloquia. Recent titles include Discovering Brockton, The Secret Life of Coffee, Detroit: Arts City, Historical Geography of Ireland, and New Orleans: Global City.

Lagniappe

These are the four basic pathways to distinction that use the word "honors," but geography students can enhance their academic programs in a number of other ways as well. Be sure to discuss these with your professors or advisors.

1. Internship: Practical experience with an outside agency or company, in which a faculty supervisor helps the student to understand the connection between the work itself and the student's academic program.
2. Directed Study: Extensive review of a particular area of geographic scholarship for which we do not offer a traditional course. 
3. Research: The Adrian Tinsley Program provides a variety of opportunities that allow students to undertake research projects with the guidance and financial support of the program and under the academic direction of a faculty mentor. These always involve on-campus presentations of research results, and my also provide opportunities to present results at regional or national conferences. Research could also lead to a publication as an author or co-author. 
4. Study Abroad: Our department offers short-term courses during summer or winter breaks, in which students travel with a faculty leader to study a geographic topic in another country. These are transformative experiences that can lead to profound personal and professional growth.
5. Geography Club: Known informally as GeoBears, the geography club is open to any student with a strong interest in the field of geography. Regular meetings involve geography-related activities and games; special events include outings (or in 2020 virtual outings) to some of our region's rich assortments of special places and outreach events on campus. Participation in the club is an opportunity for extra learning, networking, and the development of leadership skills.

GeoBears is open to all BSU students.
See more on GeoBears Insta

Maps Tell Stories

BSU Geography Students in Action

The final project assignment for Dr. Boah Kim's spring 2020 course GEOG 413 Applications in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) served several purposes. Mainly, the experience of finding a problem to address, determining the data requirements, and developing an analysis model that successfully answers the original question. Students were expected to develop a project that applies analysis techniques.

Each project below is represented by a single snapshot from a much larger GIS Story page. Please click each title to see the narrative, maps, and other graphics contained in each of these projects.

As with all courses at Bridgewater State University and many colleges around the United States, this course began in the classroom, but final projects were completed under the complication of a sudden shift to online teaching and learning. We in the Department of Geography are very proud of what Dr. Kim and her students achieved!

MCAS and Special Education Graduation Rates
Samantha Cave
The Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System(MCAS) test and how it effects the graduation rates of students with disabilities

Middleborough Protected and Recreational Open Space
Joseph Osborne
Identifying local discrepancies in the MassGIS Protected and Recreational Open Space data and mapping accessibility to Open Space in the town

Food Deserts in Brockton, MA: A study in accessibility
Maria De La Fuente
Communities without local grocery stores and how demographics are related to food access

The Novel Coronavirus and Its Impact on Us
Justin Fitzgerald
The timeline of this new infectious disease and how it went from a local issue in Wuhan, China to an event affecting billions worldwide

Health & Recreation
Ally Osborne
The accessibility of natural environments and scenic landscapes throughout Massachusetts are compared to identify counties where public health would benefit from more accessible public parks

Save the Turtles, Save the World
Jesse Scopa
New threats to the recovery of  Diamondback Terrapins, the only brackish water turtle in North America

Changing Ethnic Demographic of Boston
Kosi Obi
How gentrification has impacted the demographics of Boston

Lagniappe

For centuries, geographers have used maps to tell stories and now we can use tools specifically developed to help craft those stories and share them widely. The first story of this kind that Dr. Hayes-Bohanan found was about a region with a very fraught geography in which he lived for seven years before coming to Bridgewater. Envisioning the Embattled Borderlands by Krista Schlyer is a powerful exploration of an endangered place that is often named and rarely understood.

City Champions

by Dr. James Hayes-Bohanan

Geography asks three questions: Where is it? Why is it there? and So what?

Photo: Brian Benson

The "it" can be just about anything, as Commonwealth Honors students in our department's Discovering Brockton First-Year Seminar discovered in the Fall 2019 semester. In this case, the inquiry into human and physical geography was at the scale of a nearby gateway city that we could visit during each week's class session.

The students met the university requirement for a writing-intensive seminar by continuing the physical field trips with written reactions. This creative group of students never failed to impress me with the wide variety of cogent insights they reached from a single shared experience.

I was very pleased when Brian Benson, one of the university's communications staff, asked to join us for one of our weekly outings. We agreed that a visit to Old Colony Planning Council was in order. Not only do the professional in this agency know a lot about the city and its surrounding communities, but many of them are geographers who have studied in our department. It was the perfect culmination of our semester's learning, and Benson's City Champions article gave a wider audience a glimpse of geography in action.

COVID19 note: I will spend the summer planning this course for Fall 2020 with most of the same field experiences plus a few I had use in earlier versions of the course and some new ones. I will be making contingency plans for online or social-distance versions of each activity.

Lagniappe

I was reminded to post this when I received the inaugural edition of  the OCPC newsletter. It begins with a focus on regionalization, a term to which I have given considerable attention since moving to Massachusetts, a state with 351 independent cities and towns; an unknown number of school districts; and an abiding commitment to illusions of local control. It has been more than a decade ago that I made a strong case for formal regionalization in areas other than planning, and I had the good fortune to share my ideas with then-governor Deval Patrick. He agreed strongly, but found the fiefdoms by which water, police, fire, library, highway, school, and other services are delivered to be extremely resistant to change. The success of regional planning remains a rare exception, but even in that case, the cooperation across town lines is largely voluntary.

The "Why" of Hills and Dales

Understanding landforms -- hills, dales, beaches, rivers -- is fundamental to understanding geography. Everything we encounter on the land is the result of processes -- fast, slow, expansive or local -- that are constantly reshaping the surface.

Our own Dr. Sandy Clark is an expert in geomorphology, which is the specialty with in geography that studies these processes. Those who study geomorph -- sometimes called the "geology of the last million years" -- will never look at the land around them in the same way. We are very fortunate that she will be offering Earth Surface Processes as a field-based course in Fall 2019. 

Click image to expand

This course requires an extra commitment of time, but that time will be rewarded with a lifetime of memories as students explore the White Mountains and Cape Cod on two separate excursions. Even if you know one or the other of these fascinating places, the exploration will reveal much about the "why" behind the "what" you have been seeing. More importantly, throughout the course you will learn new ways of understanding every landscape you encounter from now on.

Note: the Grand Canyon is shown on the course flier even though the fieldwork does not go quite that far from campus, because it is in the region where Dr. Clark gained her expertise, as a graduate student and river guide. Learning about the Colorado Plateau from her is the next best thing to being there!

Major Improvements

The Department of Geography is pleased to announce the final approval of four new concentrations in geography at BSU. After an extensive process of internal review, external review, further internal discussion, and working with campus-wide governance and Academic Affairs, we are pleased to announce that all newly declared majors will have four options, each tailored to particular facets of the intellectual and professional life of geographers.

Mandela Fellows from throughout Africa visiting the department's
EarthView and Africa floor map.
Map & photo: BSU alum Kevin Bean.

As in the past, all of our majors will complete a common set of course requirements, which serves to provide a common grounding in the discipline and ample opportunity to develop professional and personal connections with other geographers. All four concentrations also require study of a foreign language through the equivalent of a third-semester course.

The concentrations are: 

BS, Applied Geography

This concentration meets the needs of students seeking careers in government, business and non-profit organizations and for students who wish to pursue a graduate degree in geography. An appropriate sequence of courses enables students to acquire a geographic perspective and the spatial interdependence of human and environmental phenomena.

BS, Environmental Sustainability and Climate Resilience 

This concentration prepares students seeking careers related to environmental policy, climate change or urban planning and in pursuit of graduate degrees in geography. Emphasis is on social-science based understanding of climate change issues, climate justice, policy, mitigation and adaptation, as well as environmental issues and environmental policies and a foundational understanding of physical geography and climatology. Students will address the vulnerability that communities, states and countries currently have with regards to the environmental consequences of climate change. An appropriate sequence of courses enables students to acquire an appreciation of the challenges engaging in and communicating sustainable solutions and climate resiliency.

BA, Geography and International Development

This concentration offers a balanced view of political, economic, social and cultural connections. Policy and geographic advantages and disadvantages impact citizens’ economic well-being and quality of life. In its broadest scope, development includes advances in social justice (such as women’s and minority rights, education and access to healthcare), and in economic progress (such as equitable distribution of income, access to employment opportunities and improvements to infrastructure). The degree offers exceptional preparation in the human-environmental framework of geography toward a critical worldview for anyone considering a career in globally-connected non-profit groups, non-governmental organization, or US or foreign government agencies or businesses effecting change on local, regional and national development problems.

BA, Geography for Educators

This concentration combine rigorous preparation in human, physical and regional geography with coursework that focuses on the cultivation of geographically-informed learners. although its roots are found in ancient Greece, geography is an ideal way to learn about the modern world. Students of geography practice both a social science and a natural science, while learning to use mapping and geoprocessing to better understand and communicate about local,regional or global problems. As a broad, integrative discipline, geography is ideal preparation for classroom teachers, including generalists in the lower grades and social studies or earth science teachers in higher grades. Students who wish to be elementary teachers are required to double major in Elementary Education. Students should also refer to the Educator Preparation and Licensure Policies and Procedures section of the catalog for specific licensure and major requirements.

Lagniappe

The department has also recently proposed new academic minors; these have also been approved by university governance and will soon be published. Watch this space, the course catalog, and Degree Works for details.