Indigenizing a Quantitative Geography course to enhance teaching and learning

During the Fall 2018 term, 53 students of the GEOG251 Quantitative Geography course taught by Dr. Shiv Balram explored indigenous issues in a quantitative and explicitly spatial manner. The goal was to illustrate how the methods and techniques from spatial geography-archive can be applied to real-world situations in search of ethical and effective solutions. Students were presented with three detailed examples. In one example related to potable water access and availability in indigenous communities, students engaged in open discussions about articulating techniques learned in the course such as problem definition and structuring, data sampling, thresholding and confidence interval standards, probability, hypothesis testing, correlation and regression, and mapping all with the goal of identifying communities for intervention solution strategies. In the anonymous feedback from 20 students (about 38%), there was strong positive agreement with the way in which the indigenous issues were systematically structured and presented in GEOG251 that enhanced student learning and awareness by: (1) facilitating creative solutions using quantitative thinking - Figure 1, and (2) translating the knowledge gained to other geographic problem-solving contexts - Figure 2.

The main academic background of the students who responded with feedback were: Bachelor of Environment (65%), Bachelor of Arts (15%), Bachelor of Science (10%), and Bachelor of Business (5%). The identity of responding students were: Female (65%), Male (35%), Other (0%) and Prefer Not Declare (0%).

These results give some insights into the benefits all students can experience from the teaching and learning process if more diverse content, from curriculum Indigenization efforts for example, is carefully integrated into the Higher Education curriculum.