Research into spatial thinking, GIS and geography education

The current government’s curriculum review, 2010 White Paper ‘The Importance of Teaching’ (DfE 2010), and New National Curriculum (2013) proposed several significant changes to the English education curriculum; most crucial of all is the increased prominence it places on the curriculum’s role in increasing the learner’s knowledge (or ‘core knowledge’). This can be seen as an attempt to re-balance the ‘trendification’ of the education system, a process from which geography has not been exempt. Indeed, since as early as the late 1990s the issue/topic being taught has had precedence over the geographical place(s) where it occurs.
 

The core skills/knowledge which are regarded as having been lost, and in need of bring back to the fore in the geography curriculum include: “factual knowledge of places, patterns and distributions, and of earth’s features and phenomena and the processing and communication of geographical data, linking it to spatial and temporal contexts” (after the Geographical Association’s Geography Curriculum Consultation Summary Report December 2011). Thus, it is clear that ‘spatial thinking’ is at the heart of this and so there needs to be a significant, or paradigm, shift in our understanding of what ‘spatial thinking’ entails and how it embodies these, and other, core organising principals of geography and geographical education.

The ‘core knowledge’ agenda will bring ‘basic skills’ – such as spatial literacy (defined by Bednarz and Kemp (2011) citing Goodchild (2006) as the ability, in its most basic form, to “capture and communicate knowledge in the form of a map [and] understand and recognise the world as viewed from above”) back to the fore. What is more, spatial literacy is a powerful area of learning, one which hitherto has existed largely on the margins, but which is a perfect example of a ‘core knowledge’ which can be learnt/delivered in the geography classroom. Indeed, geography is perhaps uniquely placed to capitalise on the emerging ‘core knowledge’ agenda not least due to its long history, or as some might say, romanticised view, of it being preoccupied with knowing places, rivers, mountains, etc.

At the heart of my research there is, therefore, a realisation of the need to develop strategies, materials and resources to prepare the English education system for, and to help geography teachers deliver, spatial literacy using GIS (in its simplest form digital mapping e.g. Google and Bing maps). The need/demand for which can only grow given that at least an elementary level of familiarity with GIS is now included in Ofsted inspection criteria (c. 2009-10). In essence, what needs to happen, is to put the spatial back into school geography and so solve, at least in part, what John Morgan calls ‘the enigma of geography and its difficulty in talking about the world’. By this I mean the explicit (rather than implicit) teaching of the core principals and concepts of location, distribution, and interconnection of places (from the micro to the macro scale) so as to once again enable geography and geographers to talk with confidence about the world.

Link to my page at UCL Geography Department: http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/about-the-department/people/research-students/adrian-manning