Teaching

Cindy Brewer’s teaching specialties are cartography and map design.  Her book Designing Better Maps offers a popular explanation of what she teaches for half of her introductory course. Her courses are hands-on with a mix of lecture and active learning during classroom meetings. Labs use new data and new topics every year, and exam questions push students to transfer concepts from lectures and labs to new contexts (oh, that’s hard). Advanced undergrads assist students in the lab sections, as teaching interns, and get involved in her research projects, which gives them a vision of themselves as future teachers and reseachers.

The courses she regularly teaches are:

  • Cartography—Maps and Map Construction (Geog 361) — cartographic principles and advanced design for reference and thematic maps using ArcGIS Pro
  • Applied Cartographic Design (Geog 467) — a project-based course with recent foci on online campus map, maps for students’ clients, multi-variate mapping, and generalization.
  • Seminar in GIScience (Geog 560) — All GISci profs in the department cycle through this course, exploring new research topics with small groups of graduate students. Scale and multivariate mapping were recent themes for Cindy.
Cindy with very big image of her book Designing Better Maps

Cindy at Esri UC in the author booth. Very big book!

She has also taught:

  • Geographic Information in a Changing World: Introduction to GIScience (Geog 260) — core to our new curriculum, taught as a hybrid course with full online content.
  • Undergraduate Collaborative Research in Earth and Mineral Sciences (CAUSE) — went around the world, from State College to Frankfurt, to Tokyo, to Abu Dhabi and back home. A true global experience.
  • Introduction to Geographic Research (Geog 500) — group-grapple with understanding all the subfields of geography, using Geography in America when it was new.
  • Professional e-Portfolio Development — for EMS undergrads creating their own professional and reflective web presence.
  • Landforms of the World (Geog 115) — enjoyed puzzling out geomorphic systems across the world, through scale and time (geomorph was her secondary area in grad school).

She is recognized as a distinguished teacher and received the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences (EMS) Mitchell Award for Innovative Teaching in 2005.