Dr. Lara Bryant Receives AGSG Award
Geography Assistant Professor Lara Bryant has received the American Association of Geographers’ (AAG) Applied Geography Specialty Group (AGSG) Class Exercise Award Competition in “Geospatial Technology Curriculum Development.”
The award recognizes an innovative applied geography class exercise that includes a fictional or real-world client. Dr. Bryant is also the coordinator of the New Hampshire Geographic Alliance, which acted as the client in need of Geographic Information System curriculum for New Hampshire classrooms.
Students enrolled in Dr. Bryant’s Geospatial Technologies for the K-12 Classroom course developed lessons for teaching geospatial technologies in the public-school classroom. Dr. Bryant will share the award with Lucas Matthews, a Secondary Education Social Science major, who wrote the exemplary lesson titled, “Thinking like General Sherman: A Look at the ‘March to the Sea’ using IGIS and GIS.” In his lesson, he expects his students to analyze geographic data related to Sherman’s historic military campaign and predict the best route to take based on relevant data. Matthews’ lesson, which is in the pilot- testing phase, can be viewed at www.nhga.net.
Dr. Bryant and Matthews will present the exercise at this year’s annual American Association of Geographers conference in New York City, where they will be formally recognized during the event’s award ceremony. The award is accompanied with a monetary amount and an invitation to submit the exercise to the International Journal of Applied Geospatial Research (IJAGR).
