Supporting Global Studies Course

During the 2019/2020 school year my colleague Andrew Poolman launched a new course at Haverford entitle Global Studies in which the students would examine a particular area of the globe through multiple lenses, cultural, linguistic, economic, environmental, sociological etc. A fascinating element of the course was that he invited members of the teaching faculty to deliver a guest presentation on an element in which that faculty member had developed expertise. I volunteered to offer my services broadly on the topic of data analysis. The students' culminating project was to pitch a funding idea and we thought it would be effective if the students incorporated some data analysis into their pitch. So I presented on how to use the phenomenal data tool Gapminder.org to research and analyze real world data in constructing their pitch. I delivered a crash course on using the tool, how to mine it for relevant data and how to use it to develop ideas for their pitch. At the conclusion of the student project, Mr. Poolman reported that a number of students effectively incorporated data into their pitch and their case was made more compelling because of it.

Supporting students in processing and analyzing real world data toward their own chosen research projects using a tool like Gapminder.org has been a longstanding goal of mine and so it was a pleasure to be able to make this contribution to the Global Studies course. I hope to have the opportunity to do so again in the future.