Thoughts on W&L's Program for Education in Global Stewardship

Hugh Blackmer
24 Jan 2001

Now that we have received the enabling grant for this Program, I want to use this medium to sketch my own vision for what might be accomplished, and to lay out what I see as opportunities, specific needs, possible solutions, and tasks for the attention of implementers of the Program.

The Global Stewardship Program aspires to broaden Washington & Lee's connections to the world beyond Lexington and "increase a campus-wide exposure to and education about the world and issues of global responsibility" by means of two Initiatives: a Certificate Program in Global Stewardship, and a Program for Global Learning Across the Campus and Curriculum. Links to departments and other Programs are integral to both Initiatives, and implementation of their goals and potentials will rely upon creative combinations of resources and energies, which will grow out of fostered and spontaneous collaborations.

Here is a case in point, relating the genesis of a collaborative idea, and leading on to my vision of some ways to achieve the broad goals of the Program:

Last week James Kahn (Director of the Environmental Studies Program) asked if I would be interested in participating in a project with a Brazilian research center (CETEM, Center for Mineral Technology) building and distributing via the Web a bibliography about the environmental effects of mining in the Amazon. I did some searches and some thinking (summarized on a separate page) and realized that Frank Settle's Alsos project (a Web-based annotated bibliography on the Manhattan Project) provides a model for solving the technical problems of creation and distribution of the Amazon mining database. I also realized that the more general issues of "environmental effects" connect with the expertise and interests of a number of faculty in several departments. In addition to James Kahn's work in environmental economics in Brazil, David Parker and Ted DeLaney (History) deal with Brazilian materials (colonial history and slavery, respectively); in Biology, John Knox has field experience in the Peruvian Amazon, David Marsh has worked in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and Larry Hurd is interested in tropical deforestation; in Geology, David Harbor's course in Climate Change deals extensively with the Amazon Basin. An article in the 19 Jan 2001 issue of Science on The Future of the Brazilian Amazon indicates broad current interests in this specific subject.

Achieving the Broad Goals of the Program

From this base it is a short leap to thinking of Brazil (and the Amazon Basin generally) as a transdisciplinary research arena and source of concrete problems that could serve as a central case in the Global Stewardship foundation courses, attract the attention of faculty in many departments, and forge links between Stewardship, Environmental Studies, and Shepherd Poverty Programs. It would also engage the interdisciplinary perspective and intellectual coordinating role of W&L's reference librarians. The next leap imagines the addition of faculty exchanges with Brazilian institutions, possibilities for W&L students to study and participate in research in Brazil, and the addition of an extracurricular Brazilian film and music series.

The point is not that W&L should develop a Center for Brazilian Studies --rather, that a core of specific interests (environmental economics, tropical biology, the history of slavery, climate change) in disparate departments might serve the purposes of the Program for Global Learning Across the Campus and Curriculum as a focus to galvanize campus interest about a specific part of the world. In another year it might be Indonesia or Central Asia which would serve as the focus, depending on where a core of faculty interest could be found. Any such geographic entity will exemplify problems (economic, political, environmental, demographic, social, etc.) which are global in scope, and sufficiently complex as to provoke cross-disciplinary interest and offer opportunities for political and economic and social analysis. Similarly, an issue like biodiversity poses interesting questions at global, regional, national and local levels. Biodiversity is not simply an ecological or biological issue; if we are to make sensible decisions in efforts to manage resources, politicians need to understand the science, and scientists need to comprehend the economics.

Recruiting Faculty for Global Stewardship

The Global Stewardship Program proposes to train students to comprehend problems at large scale --to develop an empirically-based sophistication about issues like health, poverty, demography, environmental conditions, urbanization and unemployment-- and to produce graduates who know how to investigate and analyze and synthesize and communicate findings. To accomplish these goals, we must offer courses which Planning, staffing and mounting the foundation courses will require the concerted effort of a group of committed faculty. Faculty will be drawn to participation in the Initiatives of the Global Stewardship Program by opportunities to use and broaden areas of interest and expertise, and by incentives that appeal to intellectual and career goals, but leadership and a clear program of actions is required to guide program development.

Defining the Program

While we can benefit from others' experiences with Global Studies and kindred interdisciplinary efforts, W&L's unique circumstances will make it necessary for us to invent and define Global Stewardship for ourselves (a Web search for the term is instructive). Here are some possible elements of an action plan:With this basis in planning and discussion, the Certificate Program could commence officially in Fall 2002, under a Director appointed during the 2001-2002 year.

It is important to explore how other institutions have approached the specific problems of information access, skill development, technical support, and faculty incentives. I have documented my explorations of Web resources, my instances of conference participation, and my visits to campuses on a series of Web pages (see the many links on my International Education page, and my report on the International Conference on GIS in Education), and I am now planning a trip to five locations in California to continue this process of fact-finding.

Students and Teachers of Global Stewardship

In the last decade electronic tools and resources have accelerated processes and spawned new complexities in every aspect of American life, and in the lives of many people in other parts of the world. Thanks largely to the ubiquity of computers we can know more about the world. Mastery of information technologies promises better management of human and natural systems.

A basic task for students of Global Stewardship is learning how to find and use information about the systems they propose to care about and care for. A Steward needs to be able to find relevant research that has been done, needs to understand the methods used and the progress made by researchers, and needs to be able to ask appropriate questions of relevant data. While the ultimate aim is to develop global perspectives and the skills to deal with global datasets, it is also necessary to develop a sense for scale, and to encourage exploration of specific examples of general problems. An excellent way to teach the skills and develop the expertise is through active engagement with real-world problems that can sustain multiple viewpoints and draw upon expertise in many fields. These needs and methods imply an array of skills, general and specific, and a support infrastructure that facilitates access to literatures and data.

Liberal arts institutions must develop productive ways to employ new technological possibilities for teaching and learning, without compromising the goal of producing broadly educated graduates who will continue to learn throughout their lives. Our students need both the traditional skills of written and spoken communication and a firm grounding in emergent technologies; they need to study and understand both Euro-American traditions and other ways of comprehending the world. Global Stewardship joins Environmental Studies and the Shepherd Poverty Program as W&L's answers to the need for relevant, practical and issue-focused interdisciplinary courses. These programs will thrive to the extent that they meet the needs and interests of the students who take their courses, and to the extent that faculty contribute time and energy to developing new ways to collaborate with colleagues here and elsewhere. These programs will measure their success by the students they attract and by the ways in which their extracurricular influence broadens and enriches campus life.

The foundation courses described in the preliminary design of the Global Stewardship Program focus on contemporary problems (Global Environment) and human variety (Human Geography and Culture). Both will be taught collaboratively, by regular W&L faculty and visiting specialists, and are interdisciplinary by design. Both require participants (students and faculty) to engage with literatures and data and analytical tools, and encourage the development of individual and institutional knowledgebases. Both courses are rooted in a geographic perspective, though their interdisciplinary aspirations go beyond what geography courses usually tackle.

Skills and Data: Needs for Support and Information

Many of the concrete problems of Stewardship (and Environmental Studies and Poverty studies, as well) have spatio-temporal components, and our graduates should know how to set about answering questions such as these:
What is the local, regional, national and global distribution of infant mortality (or illiteracy or heavy metal pollution or soil erosion or sharecropping), and what is its temporal trajectory? What are the related environmental and social variables? What do you need to know to answer the underlying questions of cause and consequence? Where will you find relevant data? How will you evaluate the quality of available data? What are the appropriate analytical tools? Who has done analyses of related problems?

Such questions are often interdisciplinary in scope, and answers may require access to information and analytical tools that are outside the experience of Washington & Lee departments and libraries.

It is important to recognize that the foundation courses as they are now described represent subject matter and require analytical skills that are not well represented at W&L. Infrastructural support for these courses will certainly make use of existing resources (computer labs and networks, books and periodicals, faculty expertise), but will also demand new materials and personnel for success. Both courses offer opportunities to develop new ways to teach (integrating computers into instruction, making new uses of multimedia resources, encouraging students to create for audiences beyond W&L, exploring electronic collaboration locally and with distant participants) and rely on the flexibility and innovative spirit that characterizes small liberal arts institutions.

Tools for information access and data analysis are essential resources for Global Stewardship. Insofar as possible, additions to resources and services should benefit multiple constituencies within the university, and lend support to developments already underway. Adequate institutional support for this program needs to include an expansion of library holdings (including provision for acquisition of digital data and other electronic resources) and analytical capabilities (including support for Geographic Information Systems [GIS]):

Library Needs: Library resources are increasingly electronic, and their efficient use requires the services of librarians as curators, consultants, and trainers. New questions create demands for enhanced access to information. The information requirements of the two projected courses will draw on existing library resources, and will generate requests for new books and periodical titles, but will also involve the development and maintenance of substantial electronic resources --datasets, satellite imagery, other non-print materials located at W&L and elsewhere. Server space to house digital information is less of an issue than organization and accessibility of electronic holdings. Libraries generally are just beginning to address such electronic collection development and access issues. The next five years will see great changes in what is available, and demand will rise for timely purchase and license of a broad array of materials and services [1]. New forms of information require more time and new expertise of library staff in all departments, and so create demands for training and redirection of energies and resources. Such costs are certainly worth paying for the possibilities they open up, as we have seen in the last decade of the proliferation of computers in libraries, and libraries on computers. No five-year projection of needs is likely to anticipate where the new demands will be (who could have predicted the effects of the World Wide Web when it first appeared on our screens in 1993?), and fiscal flexibility will certainly be still more necessary.

GIS Needs: The importance of GIS as an analytical, presentational and teaching tool means that a significant allocation of resources must be made for GIS support [2]. As GIS gains acceptance as a professional tool and availability of spatial data continues to expand, the expertise of a GIS specialist (who combines knowledge of specific software, local and remote computing environments, and the acquisition, storage and manipulation of data) will be necessary. Extension of GIS into the courses of the Stewardship Program will require more energies and knowledge than are currently available, and Environmental Studies, Politics, Biology, Journalism, History, Archaeology and probably other departments will soon find more uses for GIS. The next steps in development of this essential tool require a higher level of support, by someone whose responsibility it is to consult and train and maintain software and resources. This person's responsibilities fall between the worlds of the Library and University Computing, and would most naturally fit into the evolving program of the Teaching and Learning Resource Center.

A commitment to making these changes and additions could be seen as support for the Global Stewardship Program, but actually would benefit the university as a whole. Global Stewardship is an exciting and novel program, with few precedents in other institutions, which should enhance the reputation of W&L among students and potential students.

For me the attraction of Global Stewardship lies in the opportunity to unite disparate interests: As a librarian I am concerned with access to information, considered in terms of (a) resources we have, (b) uses people make of the tools we provide, and (c) the necessity to teach the skills of Information Fluency. As a professor I am especially interested in information visualization and the integration of the computer into teaching and learning. And as an anthropologist I have a lifelong involvement in human geography. The Program in Global Stewardship links these interests, excites my penchant for interdisciplinary exploration, and provides an anchor point for my enthusiasm for GIS as a tool for analysis and communication. I imagine that others will be as excited as I am about this Program, as they are able to see ways to link their expertise and interests.


Endnotes:

[1]: A case in point: databases like ISI's Web of Science and archives like those at JSTOR are creating new possibilities for interlinkage and mining of information resources, and will contribute to development of new ways to teach and do research. These developments are directly relevant to the broadening of perspective that is intrinsic to Global Stewardship, and they have a predictably unpredictable way of generating demands for new expenditures once their implications are understood. It is easy to predict that ISI's Social Science Citation Index will soon be a necessary tool (broadly applicable to work in the Williams School and History, Sociology and Psychology departments). Attention to the process of collection development (under a specific fund) for Global Stewardship will certainly result in identification of other materials.

[2] On GIS:

GIS is a primary tool for exploration and analysis and presentation of the sorts of data that global and regional studies require, and we have made substantial progress in introducing analytical capabilities and developing a library of digital data and support materials. Access to GIS skills presents some practical difficulties and requires a substantial time commitment for the learner. Much of the intellectual background to GIS has developed within the academic discipline of Geography, which (largely because of its rarity in the American university context) is not well connected to cognate science and social science disciplines. Consequently, researchers with spatial data in fields such as Anthropology, Environmental Studies, Politics, Marketing, Economics, History, Journalism, and Biology have rarely had professional support in efforts to use GIS unless their campuses had friendly and generous Geography (or sometimes Geology) departments.

Most Geography departments teach GIS: they offer training in the technical specialty and operate certificate programs that train their graduates for employment in companies and governmental agencies. Students from other departments may be able to take GIS courses, and GIS may be used in other Geography courses, but the influence on faculty in other departments is minimal.

The use of GIS as a classroom and research tool outside of Geography departments is rare but growing, and requires institutional support to encourage professors to explore teaching with GIS. Such support for faculty and student use of GIS is provided on some campuses by an interdisciplinary GIS lab, often housed in the library and/or included in an Instructional Technology center. On a few campuses digital data are considered to be just another form of information, part of the emerging mission of the digital library, but most libraries have not reached this point.

Our gradual evolution toward GIS 'literacy' began more than five years ago with David Harbor and Morris Trimmer's development of GRASS (a UNIX-based GIS environment, originally created by the military) into an effective tool for teaching and research in Geology. My own involvement began in 1998 with a Class of 1965 award which allowed me to purchase a library-wide license for ArcView and start experimenting with desktop GIS in the Windows environment. John Blackburn and I have been the main proponents of the development of GIS as a teaching tool, and the Miley server has developed as a primary repository for spatial data. In 1999 W&L negotiated an ArcView site license and access (in the Geology department) to ArcINFO; and in the next development cycle of ESRI products it will be necessary to upgrade to a much more powerful version of the software.

My LAAP proposal (March 2000) was an attempt to design an initiative for incorporation and support of GIS as a teaching and learning tool on campuses of the 15 Associated Colleges of the South (ACS). Many of the issues discussed in the proposal are directly applicable to extending the uses of GIS at W&L.

Support for classroom and research use of ArcView at W&L has been provided on a volunteer, ad hoc, seat-of-the-pants basis, mostly by three believers: David Harbor (who teaches W&L's only GIS class), John Blackburn (who has introduced GIS into several administrative departments), and myself (as a teaching tool in Anthropology of East Asia, and in courses and offices in many departments). Tom Ahnemann provides University Computing support for Harbor's uses of ArcView and ArcINFO. None of us has formal training (beyond some ESRI short courses), and certainly none of us aspires to be a GIS specialist.