A hard binary to shake: The limitations and possibilities of teaching GIS critically

Abstract

• Many traditional GIS courses do little to teach GIS critically and critical GIS courses are relatively rare. • Several scholars are interviewed to identify key barriers to teaching GIS critically. • Pedagogic strategies are presented to navigate and circumvent these barriers. This paper builds upon studies employing a syllabi-based methodology that suggest a tendency for critical geographic information science (GIS) courses to emphasize reading/discussion about GIS without actually doing GIS, and for traditional GIS instruction courses to emphasize the technical capacities of GIS software without incorporating critical theory in substantive ways. However, through ethnographic evidence we reveal that there is likely more innovative theory-practice transcending pedagogies being utilized than would necessarily show up in such a syllabi-based methodology. There are also very real and differentially manifest pragmatic, departmental, and institutional barriers in place to effectively incorporating critical social theory into courses that actually do GIS. We first catalogue these barriers as a means of ascertaining what can (and cannot) be done to overcome them through GIS pedagogic innovation. We then outline the (often-veiled) pedagogic strategies deployed by critical GIS scholars today to navigate and circumvent these barriers.

The Art of Human Participation Against Artificial Intelligence With Geospatial Information System in the Tourism Industry

“…Accepting participation as a legitimate political approach and process, due to the belief in the role of people in the development process, has a great tendency to produce and use participation information, including participatory data and spatial information. This tendency provides the grounds for the use of extraordinary capacities that are the result of combining the capabilities of the geographic information system with innovations in the field of information and communication technology and new approaches based on electronic and online participation (Ghose, 2017;Anderson and Radil, 2019).…”

Introduction to the special section: Teaching critical GIS | Teaching GIS critically

“…Matthew Anderson and Steven Radil (2019) lead with an ambitious ethnography of contemporary GIS education drawn from interviews with nine critical GIS scholars. They ask a deceptively simple question: how do you actually teach critical GIS?…”