Class Projects
Recently I've been collaborating with my students on web-based class projects. Here are some examples of those projects from the last few years, with links to the project web pages.
These Story Maps are the final projects for GEOG-368, Health GIS, Spring semester 2022. Projects topics included maternal health in Quito, Ecuador; social determinants of Zika in Colombia; and asthma and health disparities in California.
These Story Maps are the final projects for GEOG-368, Health GIS, Spring semester 2021. Projects topics included Greenspace and Health in Minneapolis; Heat and Vulnerability in St. Louis; Elevated Cancer Rates in Louisiana's Industrial Corridor; HIV, Antiretroviral Therapy, and Women in the U.S.; and Maternal Mortality Disparities and Protective Interventions. I taught the class with the able assistance of Dio Cramer.
For its final project in Spring 2021 (module 4), the Medical Geography class (GEOG-256) made a major contribution to the Macalester College Archive's Place and Community in a COVID Landscape collection. Students conducted a series of oral history interviews that documented personal experiences of the pandemic from approximately January 2020 to April 2021. Entering what we hoped would be the waning days of the COVID-19 pandemic, we decided it was important to capture these experiences for posterity.
For its final project in Fall 2020 (module 2), the Medical Geography class (GEOG-256) reviewed the literature to understand different dimensions of the COVID-19 pandemic: how the virus emerged, the strengths and weaknesses of the international response, social inequalities and racial gaps in incidence of COVID, and the reasons for vaccine hesitancy, among other topics.
A part of the College's "Mobilize Mac" initiative, the Democracy in Action Community-Based Seminar offered students the opportunity to understand what it means to engage in the practices of democracy collectively and contribute to the broader community, mainly by working on political campaigns ahead of the important November 2020 elections. I conceived and co-taught this course with Paul Schadewald, of the Macalester Civic Engagement Center. The link above takes you to a story about the class from our alumni magazine, Macalester Today.
As the director of the Community and Global Health concentration, I lead a yearly seminar where our seniors discuss, recap, and showcase their independent research and/or civic engagement projects. Typically our students will do an internship with a public health agency or a local non-profit organization, or do service learning as part of a study abroad experience. The above link takes you to the 2021 seminar, and there is also a web page for the 2020 seminar. Approximately 40 different student experiences are represented here!
This was the first of my web-based class projects, from the seminar course Public Health in Latin America. Student authors were responsible for research, writing, peer-to-peer editing, and web design. Each student contributed four research articles, in these categories: biographical sketches, key concepts, institutions and groups, and important diseases or issues. I am pleased to say that our site gets lots of visits, as it serves as an English-language introduction to the rich topic of public health in Latin America.