The entirety of the content of this blog essay is available as an ArcGIS Story Map, which might be useful if you would like to use it for an upcoming workshop, conversation with other faculty, deans or principals, or even with students. It is here: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/39ff55e6a4c5456aba4726c430d0180a
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1. GIVEN THAT awareness of important Earth-related issues is at an all-time high...
The key 21st Century issues that were largely the focus of geographers, city planners, and environmental scientists are now in the general public discourse, including the UN SDGs. I hear these issues discussed by a wide variety of people in a wide variety of general public settings, including on airport shuttles, on stairwells, in public libraries and coffee shops, and elsewhere. This is bringing new attention to the value of the geographic approach as a holistic interdisciplinary set of perspectives, content knowledge, and skills.
Arizona USA landscape; Photo by Joseph Kerski.
2. GIVEN THAT the skills that instructors teaching GIS or teaching with GIS in another discipline are in high demand in the workplace...
These instructors are giving their students superpowers! Teaching GIS and teaching WITH GIS provides students with 3 legs of what I call the geoliteracy stool: Content knowledge, communications and geo-technology skills, and important perspectives: Holistic thinking, systems thinking, critical thinking, and spatial thinking. These skills and perspectives empower students to become change agents in the world.
Recent graduates discuss how GIS skills helped them gain meaningful employment. Photograph by Joseph Kerski.
3. GIVEN THAT an increasingly large component of our data-rich world is mappable data...
Thanks to open data portals and the great volume and variety of GIS mapping and analysis occurring around the world, data repositories such as the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World , ArcGIS Hub sites , and elsewhere are online and available. Plus, instructors and students can create data themselves via spreadsheets, field collection tools such as ArcGIS Survey123 and ArcGIS Field Maps, fitness apps, and by many other means.
The ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World is a curated set of over 9,500 data layers, maps, and apps.
4. GIVEN THAT Interactive mapping tools can be used AND created...
One example of interactive mapping tools connected to real-time data is this Live Feeds Status report. These tools have become a nervous system of Planet Earth (as Jack Dangermond, Esri Founder, frequently mentions) and can serve as effective teaching tools about the dynamic Earth—its current status via hazards, air quality, and much more.
A small section of the data at one’s fingertips via the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World Live Feeds.
Other examples of rich libraries of data to teach with and learn from include the Wayback imagery app and The Water Balance App. One example of teaching with these tools is my guidelines, here: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/52ae78c57b3a4924bff9fd490d76ee10. Plus, students and instructors can create their own maps and apps using these same tools such as ArcGIS Online maps, story maps , infographics, and dashboards. It is good for instructors to become familiar with creating these tools and content, but I strongly advise to give these tools to the students! Empower THEM to create these content items as well!
5. GIVEN THAT geotechnologies is inherently disruptive...
Disruptive in a good way! A way that we need in education and society! It crosses--
- Disciplinary boundaries: STEM, social studies, art, design, communications, ethics, sociology, economics, geography, mathematics, business, earth science, engineering, and more.
- Physical boundaries: Watersheds, biomes, ecoregions, landforms, and more.
- Political boundaries: Cities, counties, special districts, states, countries.
- It is ALSO being used in INSTRUCTION, RESEARCH, and in FACILITIES MANAGEMENT in academia, and in government, industry, and nonprofits.
This book I co-authored is an example of teaching across disciplinary boundaries, and contains 65 hands-on activities that require no sign in, focused on core mathematics principles of set theory, expression building, and measurement, solving engaging, real-world problems.
6. GIVEN THAT teaching with geotechnologies appeals to why we became educators…
How walkable is your community? ... is my example of connecting 4 parts of the ArcGIS Online platform: Maps, story maps, dashboards, and field surveys. The open survey invites people to add their own photographs at locations in their own community to assess whether that location is walkable or not, and consider why walkability matters, and perhaps even take action to improve walkability.
These same techniques and tools could be used to study noise, pedestrian and vehicle counts, water quality, weather, graffiti, sustainable solutions in the community, historical structures, public art, and much more. Students can create maps and visualizations (such as dashboards and story maps ) that could be shared with their peers, your school or university campus, or with thousands of people. Their maps could help people become aware and engaged about an issue, and even inspire your students or the readers of these maps and infographics to take action about that issue.
Are these places walkable or not? See the survey, maps, and dashboards to find out. Fill out the open survey for your own community or location of interest and think about what you could do with these same tools.
8. GIVEN THAT societal considerations about geographic data can be integrated into instruction...
Maps and location are inherently tied to societal issues. The Spatial Reserves data book and blog covers societal issues of ethics, copyright, location privacy, and data quality. It is updated every two weeks with short, teachable essays tied to engaging activities that empowers educators to teach these topics. These are fundamental to contributing to geoliteracy (below).
Fostering geoliteracy includes teaching core content knowledge (climate, natural hazards, population, demographics, biodiversity, natural resources, regions, and more), skills (change over space and time, spatial thinking, systems thinking, holistic thinking, communications, and more), and the geographic perspective.
9. GIVEN THAT the body of lesson content is robust...
GeoInquiries , Learn ArcGIS , regional Centers for Geography Education , the public domain set of activities, and many other libraries of lessons aid in teaching core content with interactive maps and apps.
When you teach with GIS, don't get too attached to tools and data - they are a means to a greater goal of understanding something in a deeper, richer way--and to take action.
10. GIVEN THAT the community of instructors is engaged, expert, and vibrant...
The Esri Education Community Space is one community worthy of engagement: https://community.esri.com/t5/education-blog/bg-p/education-blog
The Geographical Association , NCGE , AAG , and other organizations are comprised of people with ideas and resources that you can connect with. The largest gathering of GIS educators is the Esri Education Summit, held each summer in San Diego.
GIS workshop for educators, Tauranga, New Zealand. Photo by Joseph Kerski.
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Given the above 10 positive forces and trends, WHY THEN, are these challenging times for educators using GIS?
- Continued societal forces are acting on education: Expanding educational choices, demographic change, micro credentials, the perceived value of higher education, and the structure, funding, and support of educational institutions.
- Continued economic and technical restructuring is impacting the workforce that all of us in education serve. All those in education have long been tasked with preparing students for jobs that may not even exist yet, but the changes seem to be happening at a more rapid and pervasive pace now, adding to the challenges.
- The increasing “enterprise” nature of GIS is translating to fewer jobs with GIS in the job title, such as “GIS analyst”, leading some students to conclude that GIS is not as highly in demand as in the past, leading to a subsequent decline in enrollment in many community college and university GIS courses and programs. Spatial thinking and GIS skills are actually in higher demand than in the past, but these skills and abilities may be listed or buried under other skills, and the job titles themselves have often changed to planner, biologist, data scientist, systems engineer, chief environmental officer, and so on.
- Forces acting on GIS (particularly AI) are moving us toward a natural language GIS. This has enormous implications for how we teach GIS, how we learn GIS, how GIS is used in the workplace, and the array of disciplines using GIS.
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DESIPITE THESE CHALLENGES, I believe that GIS in education AND in society is poised to do what the realization of Andromeda did exactly 100 years ago. Just as in 1926 when the realization dawned on people that Andromeda wasn't just a dust cloud rotating around our own Milky Way galaxy, but that (1) Andromeda was an entirely separate galaxy, (2) Andromeda was even larger than our own Milky Way galaxy, and (3) perhaps many other fuzzy objects detected with the eye or telescopes were ALSO galaxies, our concept of the size of the universe greatly expanded in a short period of time.
Similarly, GIS is used in nearly every discipline, from agriculture, astronomy, and archaeology, to zoology, and everything in between. But I believe all of this will pale in comparison to the impact it will have in the future. Truly, the glory days for GIS are ahead!
GIS is poised to greatly expand our capabilities of making wise decisions, analogous to what the realization of what Andromeda really was, exactly 100 years ago.
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Key Questions, then, for educators to grapple with, include:
(1) Which of the above forces in GIS do you believe most directly impacts or should impact your instruction?
(2) Given the changes in job positions and enterprise GIS, how are you articulating these changes to students seeking employment?
(3) Given the move toward a natural language GIS, how could or should this impact our instruction, lessons, courses, and programs?
(4) Which of these instructional strategies do you feel we need to discuss more as a community?
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In conclusion (for now!), I believe that these are ideal times to be teaching and learning with GIS for the following reasons:
- Sometimes change brings innovation in education, as I wrote about here: https://community.esri.com/t5/education-blog/sometimes-change-brings-innovation-gis-programs-in/ba-p/1477948 . I think we need to recognize that many of our colleagues in education are hurting, and that sometimes, students are not finding meaningful employment. It is often difficult to go through change, but re-evaluating why, when, and how we teach what we teach always bears fruit in the long run. Recently I met with the provost of a thriving energy-earth-environment focused university. She is using today's challenges to re-think the segmented and siloed department model that her university has operated under for the past 100 years, asking and pursuing more vibrant, interdisciplinary, and exciting pathways. Other administrators and educators are following suit.
- Many of us started in GIS when it was driven by entering commands, one at a time. With the advent of the GIS GUI (Graphical User Interface), people now are incredulous when I tell them that I started using GIS before the GUI existed. Similarly, in the not too distant future, when you are using Geo AI tools and generative prompt-driven capabilities in your GIS, people are going to be incredulous when you tell them that you used GIS when you were dependent on the GUI. Change is constant.
- Our lessons, curricular items, and courses will be much less tied to learning software tools and more focused on solving problems. I encourage instructors to start preparing now for these changes. In the past, the primary guidance that students had to tackle GIS tasks we gave them were our lessons, and thus those lessons had to include many detailed instructions and screen captures. Given the advancements of AI powered searches, ArcGIS documentation reading like an e-book laden with helpful graphics and videos, and increasingly intuitive GIS tools and workflows, you can back off on the instructional detail needed and focus on the problems you want students to solve and the perspectives you want them to gain.
Most instructors enjoy creating curricular items, and these items become labors of love that we continuously update, hone, and republish. I encourage you to use this time to rethink how to structure those items. I'm not encouraging you to do something I haven't grappled with and done myself. To be honest, it was difficult for me to give up my tried-and-true lesson where students went to www.census.gov, downloaded and formatted housing and populated data, and then downloaded and formatted the boundaries, 'pouring' the data into the boundaries, and then were ready to make choropleth maps and do analysis. But my lesson on this topic had grown to over 40 pages, and I realized that (1) the cycle of updates on this and hundreds of my other lessons was never going to end, (2) students were not reading my detailed instructions any longer because they didn't need to; if they got stuck they would watch a video or read the software documentation, and (3) I could accomplish my goals of working with census data and fostering "joining" skills by changing my lesson to using the census data from the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World together with the Enrich tool. That lesson was now down from 40 pages to 2 pages, freeing my time to work on other aspects of my courses, and freeing the students time for more analysis and synthesis, and less processing. Double win! - I believe all of these changes are going to lead us back to why most of us began using GIS in the first place--not to teach where GIS tools were located in any specific software package, but to help people think critically, holistically, and spatially. Many of us have long dreamed of a "natural language GIS" ! This return to our "roots" will make education more inquiry-driven where problem-based learning can thrive as never before.
We will be able to more deftly and nimbly pursue the 'what-if' we changed the scale, the variables, the resolution, or location. We will be better able to analyze patterns, relationships, and trends. We will be more readily able to be seeing problems and solutions in agriculture, energy, water, equity, natural hazards, demography, behavior, business, economics, and other topics and themes.
We will be better able to do so in what we love the best--in an interdisciplinary mode. We will in a very real sense be IN the data rather than using being OUTSIDE them manipulating the tools. We as instructors will benefit, our courses and institutions will benefit, and students will benefit, fulfilling their career dreams and becoming positive change agents in society.
I look forward to your reactions.
