David Jones is fairly new to the faculty at Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU), being a full-time instructor in his fourth year. His background is in Community, Urban, Environmental and Regional Planning, which makes him an ideal instructor for classes with a Chicago focus. He comes to NEIU with two Master Degrees. Regarding his academic background, Jones states, “My undergraduate work was in geography and urban studies (. . .) in upstate New York, at Colgate.” What followed was a “Master of Science degree in City and Regional Planning from the College of Architecture at IIT. More recently, in the nineties, [I received] a Master of Fine Arts from Roosevelt University. There their Fine Arts degrees include Creative Writing and Visual Arts. I combined the two. I decided what I was interested in was the visual aspects of letters, as well as the message inherent in letters, by stringing letters together, in what some refer to as Concrete Poetry. The outline of a poem is arranged typographically so that there is some visual representations of the content.”
Jones is currently teaching four courses for the Spring 2008 semester, including World Geography, Intro to Environmental Studies, First Year Experience: Chicago Geographies-Environmental Chicago, and Research Methods in Environmental Perception. This last class is particularly essential because “it’s a requirement, a newly imposed requirement. Graduate students in this department have to have had [Research Methods in Environmental Perceptions] as an undergraduate, or take it now before they can continue.”
It seems like a fairly heavy course schedule to handle but Jones says, “Instructors have to have, in an academic year, six to eight classes. So what we do in my department is four classes in the fall and three in the spring, or in my case, three in the fall and four in the spring, so that if somehow a class doesn’t fill we can still be three and three and be considered full-time.”
Jones encourages field work for all of his students offering many suggestions throughout a semester for outside projects such as visits to places like the Chicago Center for Green Technology, the Northwestern University Observatory, exhibits like the recent Maps showcase at the Field Museum and Pere Marquette State Park, down state in Jersey County, for one of the geological field trips offered through isgs.uiuc.edu
“In the Fall Semester I will be teaching a field class on the Chicago River,” says Jones. “We’ll be out in the field on 9 or 10 successive Saturday mornings before getting back into the classroom in mid-November, as the weather starts to get cold.”
One of Professor Jones’s pet projects outside of the university is intimately exploring the coastline of Lake Michigan. This requires him to estimate how much he will explore in one of his days off, drop a vehicle at the far end of his planned journey and then to hike through the day to reach it. He says, “the walk around Lake Michigan began at the mouth of the Chicago River in the Loop and proceeded counter-clockwise, through Indiana, into Michigan, and I have now attained a distance of about 250 miles, having most recently arrived at Ludington, MI (this summer I will walk from Ludington to Manistee or Onekema, or maybe farther, depending on my schedule).”
For those interested in discussing any of a wide variety of geographical and cartographical subjects, David Jones can be reached through the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, in his office S344H or by email at D-Jones1@neiu.edu