Curriculum, pedagogy and GIS

Mary Fargher

Institute of Education, University of London

m.fargher@ioe.ac.uk

This presentation addresses a specific aspect of secondary school geography education, the role of GIS in supporting curriculum development. It begins with a review of the relationship between school geography curriculum development, pedagogy and GIS. The review is followed by a summary of classroom-based findings from a recent PhD study. A model of geographical knowledge construction in GIS is presented as a device for supporting and developing teachers’ further engagement with GIS in school geography. The presentation concludes with recommendations for using the model in conjunction with the new KS3 Geography curriculum.

 

School Geography and GIS - A Review

Conventional GIS

Adapted industrial software e.g. ArcGIS

GIS for schools e.g. Aegis

Neogeography

Virtual globesWeb-based Geography apps e.g Bing

GIS USED IN THE CLASSROOM

ENQUIRY

PREDICTION

PROBLEM-SOLVING

ANALYSING SPATIAL PATTERNS

LINKING STATISTICAL ANALYSES EG CORRELATION TECHNIQUES

TEACHERS AND STUDENTS USE GEO- REFERENCED DATA UPLOADED BY OTHERS

STUDENTS CREATE AND ADD THEIR OWNINFORMATION

INFORMATION IS CREATED IN A NUMBER OF FORMATS EG TEXT, VIDEO, AUDIO

CONVENTIONAL GIS

NEOGEOGRAPHY

NEW/FUTURE GIS?

NEOGEOGRAPHY

‘ Neogeography combines the complex techniques of cartography and GIS and places them within reach’(Turner, 2006)

Student experiences, motivations, learning

Geography: the subject discipline

Teachers’ pedagogic choices and performance

Underpinned by Key Concepts

Thinking Geographically using scale as a lens

Learning Activity e.g. Viewing regional disparity in Worldmapper

How does this take the learner beyond what they already know?

Curriculum Making with an online mapviewerCurriculum Making with an online mapviewer

(Adapted from Lambert and Morgan, 2011)

VIEWING REGIONAL VIEWING REGIONAL DISPARITY OF WEALTH DISPARITY OF WEALTH THROUGHTHROUGHWORLDMAPPERWORLDMAPPER

www.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=149#

THE QUESTIONS PUPILS WANT TO ASK:

• Where and why do children have to work?

•What are the impacts of our consumption?

What is it like to live near such contrast?

(Making Geography Happen, 2009)

‘The map shows the earnings of the poorest tenth of the population living in each territory. Japan is disproportionately large because Japan is the territory where the poorest have the highest average incomes. The larger the territory appears relative to its population, the better off its poor are in a global context.’

http://storymaps.esri.com/stories/torchrelay/

ESRI ARCGIS ONLINE Storymaps – The Olympic Torch Relay

http://www.geography.org.uk/projects/planetsport/london2012

http://video.esri.com/watch/2860/story-maps-a-new-medium

Housing quality data survey using GIS in a school GCSE project: MAPPING THE URBAN STRUCTURE OF BISHOP’S STORTFORD (O’Connor, 2007)

USING CONVENTIONAL GIS TO SUPPORT GEOGRAPHY

Christian Nold ‘ Greenwich Emotion Map’ (2006)

DEEP MAPPING?

• Teach First student teachers • ArcGIS online ARGOL• Mapping microclimates via

satellite/mobile phones/cloud data

• Storymapping

PhD Research Summary – Fargher 2013

• Focus on role of GIS in supporting relational understanding of place

• 2 case studies + 1 practitioner research enquiry

• 9 teachers, 44 students, 1 practitioner researcher

Key GIS roles :

- Geographical integration

- Geovisualisation

- Limits to place construction in GIS

- Advantages of a hybrid combining spatial analysis and Neography to broaden place knowledge construction

- Key role of specialist in combining subject and technological content knowledge

GEOGRAPHICAL INTEGRATION

• The principal purpose of geography scholarship is (thus) synthesis, the integration of material on relevant characteristics to provide a total description of a place or a region which is identifiable by its peculiar combination of those characteristics. (Johnston and Sidaway, 1979, p 51)

GEOVISUALISATION – the ‘fourth r?’(Goodchild, 2008)

Using digital geospatial tools – conventional GIS and ‘neogeography’ to develop geographical understanding

PROCESS

GEOGRAPHY KNOWLEDGE

LIMITATIONS

PROCESS

CONVENTIONAL GIS

VIRTUAL GLOBE

A C

B D

E F

OPPORTUNITIES T

A MODEL OF TEACHING AND LEARNING GEOGRAPHY THROUGH GIS

TEACHERT

‘provides reliable and in a broad sense provides ‘testable’ explanations or ways of thinking;is the basis for suggesting realistic alternatives;enables those who acquire it to see beyond their everyday experience; is conceptual as well as based on evidence and experience;it is always open to challenge; is acquired in specialist educational institutions, staffed by specialists;is organised into domains with boundaries that are not arbitrary and these domains are associated with specialist communities such as subject and professional associations;it is often but not always discipline-based.’

(Michael Young , Tübingen,2009 Keynote Lecture: Educational policies for a knowledge society: reflections from a sociology of knowledge perspective,)

POWERFUL KNOWLEDGE

NEW CURRICULUM AND GIS RECOMMENDATIONS

• ‘Contextual knowledge’

• ‘Scale’

• ‘Interconnection’

• ‘Collect, analyse and communicate with a range of data’

Scale

‘An enabling concept’(Herod, 2010)

...........What does this mean for GIS in education?

Scale is not as fixed as we can sometimes imagine

• Places are made at a local level – partly regionally and globally but not at the expense of one another.

(Latham, 2002)

• ..........Scales interplay with each other

• Scale is a central dynamic

• GIS can be used as a means of adjusting the scale lens to better understand in-between scales of the global, regional, local

• Creative use of scale in GIS can enhance geographical understanding