Building a STEM and GIS Learning Ecosystem Under Constraint: A Field Experience from Ukraine
When GIS Enters the Classroom
I teach in a public school in the Odesa region of Ukraine. In recent years, education here has been shaped by constant tension between stability and disruption. Under these conditions, schools tend to rely on familiar approaches—not because they are necessarily optimal, but because they provide organizational stability.
New technologies rarely enter such environments as fully developed solutions. They enter through people, practice, and interpretation. Our starting point was the national youth initiative “CyberDzhura.” Through it, we gained access to broader educational modernization efforts and received an ArcGIS Online educational license. That access became the entry point for introducing GIS into STEM learning.
At first, nothing was standardized. There was no fixed methodology or structured implementation path. Only a small group of STEM teachers representing science, informatics, and applied technologies who were trying to understand what spatial data could actually mean in a classroom.
As implementation progressed, an unexpected pattern emerged. We expected that by introducing the same GIS tools to other schools and sharing our experience, we would see similar results. Instead, something far more interesting happened. Teachers did not reproduce our ideas—they interpreted the technology through their own professional experience, their own interests, and the needs of their students. Every project became a reflection of the educator behind it. The choice of topic, maps, color palette, storytelling style, and even the presentation tools revealed as much about the creator as about the project itself.
We often say that every person is a world of their own. Yet professional roles frequently encourage us to standardize our thinking and follow established patterns. What surprised me most was realizing that a technology originally designed to solve engineering and spatial problems could also become a medium for personal expression. Instead of seeing identical projects, I began to see different people—their intellectual curiosity, research interests, ways of thinking, and unique perspectives on the world. That was the moment I realized that GIS was much more than a tool for spatial analysis. It had become a language through which people expressed not only what they knew, but also who they are and how they understand the world.
That realization became one of the most inspiring moments of this journey for me. I deliberately resisted the temptation to offer ready-made scenarios or templates. Instead, I shared only a few examples and encouraged educators to interpret the technology through their own professional experience. My hope was not that they would reproduce our ideas, but that they would discover their own. Watching this happen was genuinely joyful because every teacher brought a different perspective, and every school became a new expression of the same shared language.
Adapting Educational Pathways
The same tools produced different educational realities. It was like giving people paints and asking them to draw a tree: Some drew green trees, some yellow, some bare branches under snow, some large forests, and some a single birch. The tool was the same, but the interpretation was completely different.
This is what happened with GIS as well. In some contexts, it became a tool for analytical thinking in STEM education. In others, it connected to creative projects, literature-based mapping, historical routes, environmental restoration, or infrastructure planning.
In more structured environments, it was even interpreted through operational or security-oriented perspectives, such as situational analysis or planning systems. The same platform supported very different ways of thinking because it reflected the priorities and imagination of the people using it. ArcGIS Online did not simply replicate our model. It became a medium through which each educational environment built its own version of practice.
Still, one shared pattern emerged: once teachers and students began working with real spatial data, learning stopped being abstract. It became situated, exploratory, and collaborative. Students collected UAV imagery of their surroundings — fields, roads, water systems — and brought it into GIS. Their local environment stopped being background and became structured data. At that point, STEM stopped being a set of separate subjects. It became a shared space of inquiry, where GIS acted as a connecting layer between disciplines.
Learning Along the Way
An important aspect of this experience was that I learned alongside my students. I am not trained as a geographer. In some cases, they understood certain tools faster than I did — and that asymmetry became part of the learning process, not a problem.
As the practice expanded, other schools began to reach out. Many already had ArcGIS licenses but lacked practical pathways for implementation. We organized a webinar for 24 educational institutions, not as a formal lecture, but as a practical sharing of experience—implementation successes, challenges, and lessons learned.
One experience remains especially memorable. I once visited the Odesa Naval Lyceum for a little more than an hour to help their teachers apply for an ArcGIS educational license, join our organizational workspace, and explore the basics of ArcGIS StoryMaps. A few months later, we met again at the national GIS project competition. Their students presented a StoryMap exploring contemporary naval warfare—a topic that reflected their own educational identity—and won first place. My own students received third place. I remember feeling unexpectedly proud, not because of our own award, but because a school that had only recently begun its GIS journey had already found its own authentic direction. At that moment, I realized that successful implementation is not about creating copies of your own work. It is about helping others discover ideas that truly belong to them.
Building a GIS Community
The response showed that the real value was not in copying a model, but in adapting it. Follow-up discussions came from different regions, including Kyiv, requesting continued methodological exchange and support. Alongside this, we began developing practical onboarding materials for educators starting their own GIS-based STEM practices.
This work is connected to a wider professional ecosystem colleagues in Kyiv, the NGO “International Interactive Academy of GeoInformation Science” (Ivan Galenko), and educators from the Kruty Heroes Lviv Lyceum (Taras Hrytsevych), where early access to student accounts and hands-on GIS environments helped shape initial implementation paths. What emerges from all of this is not a uniform model but something more resilient: a distributed ecosystem of practice where tools remain the same, but meaning is continuously redefined by context.
Conclusion
GIS in education is not only about technology or replication of methods. It is about what happens when a shared tool enters different minds, different priorities, and different realities and becomes something new each time. In that sense, GIS is not a system that is copied. It is a space where different visions of learning, work, and even society can take shape simultaneously and in their own ways.
I always welcome conversations about GIS education, STEM, and international collaboration. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or contact me at [email protected].
