Student Collaborative Writing Groups: An Interdisciplinary Exploration of Spatial Information

There is a rich literature on the role of undergraduate research in enhancing the overall undergraduate experience (Kardash 2000; Linn and others 2015) and improving students’ understanding of how to conduct a research project (Russell, Hancock, and McCullough 2007; Hunter, Laursen, and Seymour 2007). It is a top priority at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario to allow students avenues to pursue both self-directed and interdisciplinary studies within their undergraduate education (Deane 2011). This collection of articles represents selected contributions from senior undergraduate students in the McMaster University Arts & Science Program. The goal of this project was to take advantage of the interdisciplinary background of the students and how they both consume and view spatial information. The output is a series of papers with a wide range of topics representing the unfettered ideas of the undergraduate researchers. The challenge of organizing their thoughts and arguments for an international audience requires the undergraduate researchers to take true ownership of their ideas (Moore and others 2011; Barber, King, and Baxter Magolda 2013).

Within most academic careers, great emphasis is placed on working collaboratively in research projects with the goal of publishing a manuscript. This extremely important skill is not typically addressed in undergraduate education (Smith and others 2015). A major hurdle in incorporating undergraduate research with a goal of publication into an undergraduate class is the time constraints, given that a typical semester is 13 weeks in length. This is where the use of a Collaborative Writing Group (CWG) model is beneficial. Within the model students have the opportunity, over a period of 8–10 weeks, to go through the entire process from formulating a research question through dissemination. Throughout the process, students are continually put in a position to question their own assumptions and those of others through numerous rounds of open discussion and editing, ultimately leading to a final document subjected to numerous passes of scrutiny. This inclusion of both peer and instructor review throughout the research process gives the students numerous opportunities to critically evaluate not only their own ideas but also those of their peers, a valuable skill that can applied in careers both inside and outside of academia (Maclachlan and Lee 2015). This process is well established and is being used with academic professionals (Healey, Marquis, and Vajoczki 2013; Maclachlan, Waraksa, and Williford 2015) and undergraduate students (Maclachlan and Lee 2015).

The McMaster Arts & Science Program began in 1981 and is still flourishing today, admitting approximately 60 students per year, with instructors brought together from numerous disciplines (Jenkins, Ferrier, and Ross 2004; Sandomierski 2014). This program is designed to provide students with, among other things, a broad-based interdisciplinary education that has been positively highlighted within a national Canadian newspaper, the Globe and Mail (Bradshaw 2013). Due to this inherent interdisciplinarity and the high achievement of the students within the program, it was determined that the use of a CWG would enhance student learning in the upper-year course “Technology and Society II,” which explores the social control of technology. The theme for the course changes each year, depending on the instructor, with the theme for the 2016 offering revolving around “Spatial Data and Decision Making.” Students in the course had varying backgrounds concerning spatial data, and course time was used to explore the importance of spatial information throughout history (Balch 2016).

The collection of articles produced by the course is quite varied, as should be expected from the diverse interests of the students. The important linkage between the articles is that spatial information can be used to improve either the perception or the services of a region. The first article explores the potential consequences of an increased capacity for the dissemination of mapped crime data to communities, including the potential public perceptions that may stem from the interpretation of the information. In “Public Crime Mapping in Canada: Interpreting RAIDS Online,” the cartographic choices used within the publicly available maps of crime data are discussed and challenged. The second article presented, “Exploring the Economic and Social Impacts of Laurier Brantford Campus,” takes a pointed look...