Department of Geography and Planning

Advancing Geospatial Thinking and Technologies in Grades 9-12:  Citizen Mapping, Community Engagement, and Career Preparation in STEM

This project seeks to improve students' spatial thinking and geospatial technology skills through citizen mapping and community engagement. By engaging students in real world issues in the context of their own neighborhoods, they are gaining knowledge and tools for enhancing their communities as well as exposure to the many career possibilities in high growth STEM sectors. This study includes students at an inner city high school in the Toledo Metropolitan Area, a diverse region facing numerous challenges. Using the inquiry method, high school students are participating in summer workshops designed to introduce them to recent advances in geospatial technology, especially in relation to understanding their communities and preparing them for the STEM workforce of the future. Students are guided through the scientific process of synthesis, analysis, and interpretation, and input data they have produced through volunteered geographic information (VGI) into open-source mapping programs to produce maps for civic action that they present to key individuals and organizations in the area.  

The result will be a curricular model that provides an effective and accessible way of introducing geospatial technologies to students through local issues, while providing them with the skills and motivation for pursuing STEM careers that utilize geospatial technology. The primary intellectual merit of this research is to leverage recent technological advances in GIS in combination with the methods of volunteered geographic information (VGI) to introduce high school students to important geographic concepts and powerful technology that will empower them as community members and provide them with marketable skills. This effort is set in the context of place based learning, which suggests that abstract concepts are best understood initially through the lens of local examples and in this project through the analysis of VGI created by the students themselves. This research project sits at the intersection of research in STEM-based geospatial technology and the broader social science concerns of community engagement and citizenship.  

Through the integration of content and technology, students are engaging in their communities and civic participation in new and exciting ways. At the local level the workshops are empowering the participating students with the knowledge and tools for enhancing their communities as well as their individual lives by exposing them to the basic technology of a rapidly growing field with substantial employment opportunities. This project also enables students, who are among underrepresented groups in a diverse region with underfunded schools districts, to consider careers in STEM. These interactions will provide senior personnel an opportunity to examine how participants come to learn, understand, make meaning and utilize knowledge and skills to answer authentic questions of larger community significance. The resulting curriculum will provide a roadmap for the use of geospatial technologies in the context of place based learning, VGI, and open-source mapping programs. Through the geographical sciences, an interdisciplinary STEM field, the findings and curriculum can be used in related disciplines in the physical and social sciences to advance knowledge and career preparation in these areas.  

For examples of recent efforts, please visit the Facebook page of Advancing Geospatial Thinking and Technologies in Grades 9-12:  https://www.facebook.com/AdvancingGTT9to12/ 

Schlemper, M. Beth. 2013. Introduction to the 2013 Marquee Address. Journal of Cultural Geography 30 (3): 274-275.