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Presenters: UCSB Center for Spatial Studies, USC Spatial Sciences Institute, Esri
How would you teach spatial thinking in a general education course to post-secondary students with no formal training in geography? If geographers and GIScientists wish to foster spatial literacy in society this is a question that must be answered. We invite colleagues to contribute to an interactive discussion about how to teach novice learners the central elements of spatial thinking – concepts of space, tools of representation, and processes of reasoning.
An intermittently updated literature discussing concepts and questions related to spatial thinking already exists. Many of those concepts and questions remain the same. However, as new environmental and social challenges emerge and geospatial technologies change, which of those concepts and questions should be prioritized in post-secondary education merits revisiting. Moreover, the existing literature tends to offer abstract, academic treatments of these concepts that are removed from the experiences of non-specialists. This session will draw from and extend that literature by restarting a practical discussion about how to teach spatial thinking with the goal of fostering spatial literacy. Colleagues will be invited to share their own conceptions of spatial thinking, the geographic questions they use to teach key concepts, their pedagogical approaches, and their classroom successes.
