{"id":8341,"date":"2019-04-22T16:58:58","date_gmt":"2019-04-22T16:58:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/citejournal.org\/\/\/"},"modified":"2019-08-30T20:10:51","modified_gmt":"2019-08-30T20:10:51","slug":"shoulder-to-shoulder-teacher-professional-development-and-curriculum-design-and-development-for-geospatial-technology-integration-with-science-and-social-studies-teachers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/citejournal.org\/volume-19\/issue-2-19\/current-practice\/shoulder-to-shoulder-teacher-professional-development-and-curriculum-design-and-development-for-geospatial-technology-integration-with-science-and-social-studies-teachers","title":{"rendered":"Shoulder to Shoulder: Teacher Professional Development and Curriculum Design and Development for Geospatial Technology Integration With Science and Social Studies Teachers"},"content":{"rendered":"
Geospatial tools have been in the K-12 curriculum for several decades, yet they remain underutilized by educators. For example, the Geography for Life <\/em>(Geography Education Standards Project, 1994) Standards called for integration of geographic information systems (GIS) into classroom instruction, but this expectation has rarely been met (Milson & Kerski, 2012). In general, the barriers to integrating GIS \u2013 complexity of the technology, difficulty in accessing datasets, and steep instructional time demands of inquiry learning \u2013 have prevented all but the most ambitious teachers from using geospatial tools with their students. The literature documents successful cases of GIS curriculum integration (e.g., Baker & White, 2003; Bodzin, Fu, Peffer, & Kulo, 2013; Rubino-Hare et al., 2016), but most K-12 students graduate with no exposure to advanced geospatial technologies such as GIS.<\/p>\n Technological and social changes since 1994, however, have made the integration of GIS and other powerful geospatial tools far more accessible than before. First, the tools themselves have changed: GIS capabilities, which have traditionally required complex client-side software manipulating bulky datasets, are now readily available and easily accessed on the Cloud. Through tools such as Esri\u2019s ArcGIS.com, users can access an ever-increasing library of maps and data. Related tools such as global positioning system (GPS) capability have expanded from expensive dedicated devices such as GPS units to ubiquitous devices such as cellphones and automobiles.<\/p>\n These technical changes have opened a floodgate of geospatial activity in everyday life. Common activities such as using paper maps for driving have been supplanted by turn-based navigation. Even when driving to a familiar location in which the route is known, drivers will commonly consult a web map to check for traffic volume, construction zones, and accidents to determine shortest routes.<\/p>\n Search engines such as Google automatically return maps in response to any location-based query. Social media and other services routinely draw upon location data, and investigating suspicious behavior may begin with reviewing a user\u2019s location history (Kantra, 2016; Kielman, 2014).<\/p>\n These technological and social changes have created both challenges and opportunities for K-12 schools. The allure comes from the demand for geospatially ready STEM workers and academics (Baker, 2012; U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration, 2016). The advent of more accessible, browser- and mobile-based geospatial technologies makes K-12 integration much more feasible than at any point in the past.<\/p>\n The remaining pieces of the puzzle are (a) untangling the challenges of integrating powerful, inquiry-driven instruction into K-12 curriculum and classroom teaching, and (b) developing models for teacher preparation and\/or professional development to make this integration possible (see Baker et al., 2015). Only when teachers and developers work side by side, shoulder to shoulder, can both challenges be addressed at once.<\/p>\n K-12 curricula and classrooms are crowded in several ways. The curriculum is crowded conceptually, packed with topics and skills that teachers must cover or risk poor performance by their students on high-stakes end-of-course assessments. These constraints leave little time for integrating novel GIS learning activities, even if they align with the curriculum.<\/p>\n The classroom is crowded both physically and temporally. The physical crowding occurs as underfunded school districts reduce personnel costs by increasing class sizes. The temporal crowding comes from the myriad demands of instructional time, classroom management, assessment routines, additional school events, and inclement weather that leads to school closings. Outside of the school day, the demands on teachers\u2019 time remain steep, as they evaluate student work, attend faculty meetings and sporting events, conduct parent conferences, participate in district-mandated professional development, and more.<\/p>\n Geospatial technologies and other new learning tools cannot easily enter this crowded space. First, teachers and students require time to learn the technologies\u2019 interface, data handling, analysis capabilities, and more. Second, the inquiry learning models that make the most effective use of geospatial technologies all require time both outside of the classroom, during teachers\u2019 scant professional development time, and inside the classroom, during instruction.<\/p>\n Finally, geospatial integration programs cannot dictate the school-adopted curriculum by altering the required content to meet the availability of maps and datasets. Instead, geospatial integration efforts must find the points of connection, entering into the existing curriculum by meshing with established expectations of content coverage and assessments that align to prescribed learning goals.<\/p>\n As a result, geospatial integration into K-12 classrooms involves a delicate harmonization of many variables, including curriculum-specified content, relevant available data and data collection opportunities, structuring low-threshold, inquiry-driven learning activities, and finding ways to weave in technology instruction along the way (e.g., Zalles & Manitakos, 2016).<\/p>\n Furthermore, successful integration requires specific technological pedagogical content knowledge (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) and support for teachers as they incorporate geospatial technologies into their classrooms. Teaching with geospatial technologies involves geospatial science pedagogical content knowledge, a specific type of technological pedagogical content knowledge. Teachers with geospatial science pedagogical content knowledge have a more complete understanding of the complex interplay between pedagogical content knowledge and geospatial pedagogical content knowledge and can teach content using appropriate pedagogical methods and geospatial technologies (Bodzin, Peffer, & Kulo, 2012). This knowledge involves understanding both how to model geospatial data exploration and analysis techniques and how to effectively scaffold students\u2019 geospatial thinking and analysis skills.<\/p>\nRationale<\/h2>\n
Challenges Specific to Geospatial Curriculum Integration<\/h3>\n
Previous Geospatial Curriculum Integration Efforts<\/h3>\n