Spatial Literacy in Public Health:

Spatial literacy-the ability to visualize, understand, and use the properties of space to communicate, reason, and problem-solve-is relevant to public health across disciplines. Spatial Literacy in Public Health: Faculty-Librarian Teaching Collaborations offers ideas and plans for collaborative spatial literacy teaching and learning initiatives focusing on Geographic Information Systems (GIS)-based and GIS-related instruction through the lens of public health topics.

Chapters include step-by-step learning activities, teaching tips, recommended readings, and four-color maps and other useful illustrations. These offer ideas that will help build skills and fluency in spatial literacy across many disciplines. Such interdisciplinary topics include supply chain management; temporal comparisons; social media campaigns; data visualization; racial disparities and other demographic themes related to immunization patterns, epidemiology, recreation access, and community health and environmental health/environmental science; and interdisciplinary projects related to education (including K-12).

Spatial Literacy in Public Health offers specific plans for spatial literacy instruction and activities in public health across disciplines. Learning activities support open source tools, open educational resources (OER), and other institutional cost-saving initiatives, and the ability to adapt from in-person to virtual instruction settings.