For the last two years, the LENS program at the University of Redlands has offered fellowships to faculty from around the country who are interested in exploring different ways to incorporate maps and spatial perspectives in their teaching and research. The fellowships include a week-long summer institute in Redlands, CA organized around a spatial theme. This year’s institute will run from June 13th-16th and is organized around the theme of ‘Mapping Communities’ (including sub-themes on history, world religion and human impacts on local environments). Lodging, registration and some meals are provided by the institute.
Please e-mail me at jlg046@bucknell.edu if you think you might be interested in applying for a LENS fellowship for summer 2012.
The website for this year’s LENS institute is not yet up, but you can click here to read about the 2010 institute and click here to read about the 2011 institute. Or read below for a more detailed description of the LENS Fellows program.
Each year, several Redlands faculty will be selected as LENS Fellows to collaborate around a unifying spatial theme or concept. Through consultations, workshops, and technical support, the Fellows will explore ways in which their teaching and research can be informed by innovative mapping ideas. At the center of this is a summer Institute, when the Fellows will be joined by colleagues from other institutions as well as domain experts who will give presentations, lead discussions, and share their insights.
During the Institute, participants will explore that year’s topic in discussions that will be both structured and open-ended. The Institute is not a “technology workshop” per se, though there will be times when we use technologies to illustrate or demonstrate a point. Instead, this Institute provides an opportunity to understand new questions and gain insights into these topics from an intellectual perspective. We will in particular explore the connections between the participants’ domain areas and the spatial or geographic questions we have about those, the capacity for existing technologies to align with those questions, and how we can help students learn through mapping to appreciate and address the questions themselves.
