Geography and Environmental Planning - CLA

Department of GEOGRAPHY and Environmental planning

Mission Statement

The Department of Geography and Environmental Planning provides students, the College of Liberal Arts, and Towson University with a unique spatial perspective that seeks to explain patterns of difference and commonality across the human and physical worlds. With the advent of the digital era, geographic information processing has enhanced the discipline’s approach to spatial analysis and visualization. Innovations in geography, such as geographic information systems, now contribute to the advancement of almost every field in the social and environmental sciences. Geography develops regional knowledge of the different peoples and places of the world, but perhaps more importantly it explores the global relationships that tie us all together and define what it means to be human in today’s global society. Geography studies the global processes that shape our physical world and, critically, the relationships between the human and the physical worlds that are vital to the future sustainability of human presence on earth. The department’s curriculum provides students with a strong liberal arts education, stressing critical thinking and a holistic perspective on contemporary social, environmental, and international issues. In addition, the curriculum provide students with tangible skills in spatial and regional analyses, cartography, and geographical information sciences that reflect the technical and informational needs of employers in academia, government, and the private business sectors.

Vision Statement

The Department of Geography and Environmental Planning at Towson University is well situated to face today’s demands on academia, particularly in promoting global awareness and providing students with the critical reasoning and technical skills that will enable them to analyze and understand an increasingly complex and interconnected world. Increasing students’ understandings of the world beyond the national borders of the United States is both our mission and vision. Students seeking to understand our globalized world will be well served by Geography’s regional studies, which will focus on important regional issues and detailed knowledge of local areas far beyond their current experiences. Intensive regional studies, however, are incomplete without courses that analyze the broad processes, physical and human that both create unique locales and, at the same time, tie us together into a single global world. As in all of the Liberal Arts, citizenship requires minds that think for themselves, that communicate clearly in oral and written form and that know how to find and evaluate information, skills that will be emphasized in all Geography instruction. Today’s electronic world demands computer literacy and Geography offers not only common computer applications but also the much sought Geographic Information Systems, computer programs that process geographically specific information. Finally, Geography offers a unique opportunity to study the interaction of the human and physical environments in environmental policy, environmental hazards, and global environmental change.