Obtaining geographical competences through online cartography of familiar and unfamiliar urban heritage: lessons from student workshops

Abstract

In times of the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers on all levels have had to adapt to an online or hybrid teaching environment. People in geography, a discipline that traditionally values field trips to connect theory to practice, have had to find online alternatives for educational activities that normally would have taken place in the field.This has led to several innovative practices, which, however, have only to a limited degree been purposively tested for efficacy because of the ad-hoc, enforced nature of the required changes. This project deals with this issue by studying, through student workshops dealing with the creation of online didactic walking routes in two cities, how students can obtain specific geographical competences such as interpreting different historical layers that collectively shape the current urban fabric through online cartography. We found that students reported clear improvements in geographical reasoning skills, regarding both GIS and heritage interpretation. There were no clear patterns regarding the role of familiarity with the studied city for the quality of the produced story maps. On final reflection, we argue that online cartographic exercises are a valuable addition to the geographers' educational toolkit to bounce forward to a more resilient, reflective educational practice after the pandemic.

Designing Online Workshops for Teacher Trainees: Heritage Mapping with Web GIS Story Maps

“…This article presents the design of workshops on web GIS story maps applied to the identification of urban heritage by teachers in training. Martínez-Hernández et al (2022) already demonstrated the workshops' learning effectiveness. In this paper we focus on design elements to reflect on the conditions that allow making most of online web-based GIS workshops, so that this effectiveness can be achieved.…”

“…Moreira et al (2023), in line with the transposition theory and the digital teaching environment models, summarized these good practices into six teaching competencies or didactic transference abilities (DTA), from a systematic literature review: Finally, the methodological fourth step (didactic basis for the evaluation of the workshop, that is, the third research objective) also took place in a descriptive qualitative way. The workshop's assignment statements partially provided by Martínez-Hernández et al (2022), as evidence items of the acquisition level of the workshop learning outcomes, were connected to the three key concepts of the didactic framework of the workshop pedagogical goal (GRS, HIC and DTA), in a detailed description.…”

“…Web GIS can reduce the impact of these drawbacks due to its more flexible and simple interfaces, the possibility of using interactive tools and its limited investment costs (Carver et al, 2004). The main didactic advantage of web GIS is that they can facilitate students' spatial reasoning (Kim & Bednarz, 2013;Martínez-Hernández et al, 2022), even beyond specific geography studies, understanding web GIS as a spatial interaction tool and not as an object study (Carver et al, 2004;Henry & Semple, 2012). The recent simplification of its use (Mead et al, 2019;West & Horswell, 2018) allows exploratory and interactive tasks that require spatial thinking without technical difficulties (De Lázaro-Torres et al, 2017).…”

“…It seems that students of teacher education programs would benefit from further exposure to didactic tools that are popular in geography, especially when they are compatible and even complementary with offsite education (Geraghty & Kerski, 2020;Martínez-Hernández et al, 2022). Consequently, the purpose of this paper is to reflect on the design characteristics of online workshops that should allow teacher trainees to make…”

“…We aim to focus on the didactic meaning of the intended learning outcomes, in terms of geographic reasoning skills (including geodigital competencies), heritage interpretation capabilities, and didactic transference ability. Doing so, this paper builds on a previously published paper in which an adaptation of the same workshop was used to assess whether digital and spatial competencies could be developed in online environments (Martínez-Hernández et al, 2022). Compared to that publication, the current paper focuses more on the design characteristics rather than on the actually achieved learning outcomes, and embeds the analysis of the design features into the literature on educational transposition.…”