Environmental health (EH) is the study of physical, chemical, and biological factors in the environment that affect human health. EH data include environmental exposures, health outcomes, and socioeconomic status (SES), which are often place-based or have geographic correlations. This chapter aims to develop students’ spatial literacy skills to address two EH themes—environmental disparities and exposure-health associations—with open online mapping tools. Environmental disparity studies address the disproportionate exposures among populations of low SES and of color. Students will learn to use EJScreen to display maps of emission clusters, pollution levels, and SES, and interpret their relationships. Environmental exposures are associated with multiple adverse health outcomes—e.g., respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. Students will explore the associations by comparing spatial patterns of exposure and disease generated with EJScreen and PLACES, respectively. Students will gain an impression of EH topics and online geospatial tools with class activities and examples.This activity is associated with a chapter in Spatial Literacy in Public Health: Faculty-Librarian Teaching Collaborations (ACRL, 2024).

This worksheet can be used in upper-level undergraduate Environmental Studies classes to showcase how to use the BEAM framework. You can model the example on the worksheet and use that to show how to explore library/other information sources to find each example, or ask a student to offer a research topic and then make a table on a white board that you fill out together, following by information source navigation demos.

If there were a list of things I absolutely required all my students to understand before leaving my class, the relationship between mass media, politics, and science would be close to the top of the list. But there are a lot of moving parts in these relationships, so the terrain is difficult to traverse.  As one might expect of a difficult topic, there is much to read and a lot to unpack.   This pathfinder discusses how politics and our mass media system complicate the dissemination of important scientific information. 

Updated Version, please download this one!  This infographic helps students figure out more information about peer-reviewed articles, including types of secondary articles like meta-analysis and meta-synethesis.  This map gives more information and helps to point them in the right direction, especially those doing literature reviews in the sciences.  

This infographic helps students figure out more information about peer-reviewed articles, including types of secondary articles like meta-analysis and meta-synethesis.  This map gives more information and helps to point them in the right direction, especially those doing literature reviews in the sciences.  

This exercise offers students a list of curated links that they will use to complete an assigned project on green roofs.  Students must evaluate, summarize, annotate, cite, and synthezize the materials in a completed document containing an ultimate recommendation for a course of action. Requires EBSCO access.

This recipe from The First-Year Experience Cookbook, edited by Raymond Pun and Meggan Houlihan and written by Kyrille Goldbeck DeBose, is a set of lesson plans originally designed for a First-Year Experience (FYE) course taught to familiarize students with several concepts across the Framework and create a foundational knowledge base to be built upon throughout their academic careers.

Evaluating a political news story presented in social media.