Emily Skop

Creating Field Trip-Based Learning Communities

Abstract In this article, I propose using the “field trip-based learning community” as a way to foster informal interaction among students and faculty. By incorporating students into the design and implementation of a field trip, faculty can engineer an environment where student and teacher encourage and learn from one another in an environment not tied to any particular class or for any course credit. The strategy operates on the premise that frequent and regular contact of faculty with students outside the classroom environment results in opportunities for both groups to not only become actively involved in learning but also to see themselves as resources for each others personal and educational growth and development. Maximizing the out-of-class academic experience is paramount.

Creating and inhabiting virtual places: Indian immigrants in cyberspace

The Internet is often appropriated by groups seeking to preserve, develop and celebrate their identities across space. Using an online survey of a group of immigrants to the United States from India as well as their American-born children, this article reveals that the Internet is utilised for overcoming separation at intra- and international scales, for creating a variety of transboundary networks and for constructing a sense of identity in virtual place. Yet the results also suggest that those individuals who use websites related to Indian culture, society, politics, history and news are distinct ‘communicationally defined’ sub-populations with regard to sex, generation and citizenship status. Indeed, ‘indices of traditionalism’ demonstrate key differences in the types of users of these virtual places.

Immigrants, their children, and theories of assimilation: family structure in the United States, 1880-1970.

This research employs United States census data from 1880 to 1970 to assess the influence of ethnicity and generation on the family structure of Mexican, Irish, Swedish, Italian, Polish, and native white children. Using evidence for three generations, it tests two theories, linear assimilation and segmented assimilation. Assimilation theory makes no special claims for ethnic effects, but segmented assimilation proposes that ethnicity influences the incorporation of immigrant-origin children into American society. We find few consistent ethnic effects on the probability of family type. Our principal finding is that migration itself, common to all groups, has similar consequences for all; these are revealed in generational changes in family structure. The historical periods of open immigration do differ from the contemporary period, which implies that immigration policy affects family structure. The results disconfirm segmented assimilation theorys emphasis on ethnicity in family structure, and confirm aspects of linear assimilation theory. They point to the salience of structural factors resulting from the migration process and policy, rather than ethnicity, in the evolution of family form among immigrant-origin persons.

The gendering of Asian Indian transnationalism on the Internet

Online activities offer immigrants an important way to maintain and recreate transnational linkages across space and time. Even though one enters cyberspace as a disembodied participant, fundamental aspects of bodily difference – gender, age, and race – shape the online activity that occurs on the Internet. Results from an Internet survey of Asian Indian Internet users in the United States provide evidence of the gendering and age-based divisions of virtual space with particular reference to the varying levels of access to the Internet, different amounts of Internet use, and distinctive types of online activities. In particular, women differ from men with regard to their total time online, the types of websites they visit, and their overall pattern of mediated communication, and these differences have a significant age-based component. Rather than seeing such differences simply as a matter of varying use of online resources, we see them as an indication of the internal segmentation of virtual space to form particular techno-social places.

The Silverton Field Experience: A Model Geography Course for Achieving High-Impact Educational Practices (HEPs).

Abstract High-Impact Educational Practices (HEPs) are a set of specific teaching and learning approaches proven effective in university education. This paper focuses on the benefits derived from utilizing three particular HEPs (inquiry-based collaborative activities, undergraduate research, and experiential learning) while teaching a snow and ice field course titled “Silverton Field Experience.” Student evaluations and instructor feedback reinforce the notion that HEPs encourage deep learning. Deep learning is manifest through increased enthusiasm and participation as well as learning in ways that are meaningful, creative, and stimulating. In terms of pedagogy in geography, these HEPs also create an expanded sense of place and a new way to encourage spatial thinking. The HEPs outlined here are replicable in different geography sub-disciplines and among different settings in higher education and prove exciting to an audience of pedagogic researchers and teacher-practitioners in geographical education.

Connecting Refugees in a Nontraditional Resettlement Destination: The Role of Social Institutions

ABSTRACT Transportation serves as the linchpin that enables refugees to enter the job market, find gainful employment, and both receive necessary services and access useful goods and services, essential to basic survival and social integration. The lack of transportation options means that refugees depend largely on the services and schedules of others, especially in the nascent months of resettlement. Recently arrived refugees who settle in traditional gateway cities like New York, Chicago, and Miami generally learn to navigate their way, as these cities have extensive public transit systems and refugee services as well as large coethnic communities in place. The trend in the United States, however, is to resettle refugees in nontraditional, automobile-dependent destinations that do not have the same density of social institutions. This study explores how resettlement agencies, transportation systems, and social networks interact as social institutions in refugee resettlement in Colorado Springs, Colorado, a nontraditional resettlement destination and an automobile-dependent city. The study uses semistructured, in-depth interviews with twenty recently arrived refugees and a resettlement agency official. The results speak to the potential for long-term integration of refugees in Colorado Springs, and more generally to the effectiveness and long-term potential of policies that resettle refugees in nontraditional destinations.

Conceptualizing Scale in the Science of Broadening Participation of Underrepresented Groups in Higher Education

The Association of American Geographers Catalyzing Research on the Geographies of Broadening Participation Creative Scholarly Retreat explored ways in which geographers can advance approaches to broadening participation of underrepresented groups in higher education and the scientific workforce. Conversations during the retreat revealed the need for theoretical models to guide research and policy development. In this article, I ask how the geographic concept of scale can inform the problem of broadening participation of underrepresented groups in higher education. First, I explain how the concept of scale can drive future research using the literature within geography. Next, I propose the situational matrix as an analytical schema using the concept of scale. I then analyze various scales first as ordering devices and then as politically produced entities in conversations about underrepresentation in higher education. I conclude by arguing that identifying the scales that are in operation and then figuring out ways in which they function simultaneously and even in mutually contradictory ways will push the project of broadening participation forward.