Geography Education in the Digital World

Linking Theory and Practice

Nicola Walshe, Grace Healy, Nicola Walshe, Grace Healy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000196702
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Secondary Education

Geography Education in the Digital World draws on theory and practice to provide a critical exploration of the role and practice of geography education within the digital world. It considers how living within a digital world influences teacher identity and professionalism and is changing young people's lives. The book moves beyond the applied perspective of educational technology to engage with wider social and ethical issues of technology implementation and use of digital data within geography education.

Situated at the intersection between research and practice, chapters draw on a wide range of theory to consider the role, adoption and potential challenges of a range of digital technologies in furthering geographical education for future generations. Bringing together academics from the fields of geography, geography education and teacher education, the book engages with four key themes within the digital world:

• Professional practice and personal identities.
• Geographical sources and connections.
• Geospatial technologies.
• Geographical fieldwork.

This is a crucial read for geographers, geography educators and geography teacher educators, as well as those engaging with existing and new technologies to support geographical learning in the dynamic context of the digital world. It will also be of interest to any students, academics and policymakers wanting to better understand the impact of digital media on education.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Navigating the digital world as geographers and geography educators

Nicola Walshe and Grace Healy

Education is shaped evermore by the digital world within which we live, yet technology is increasingly something that ‘gets done’ in education without much thought or reflection (Selwyn, 2013). The explosion of digital media and readily accessible big data opens up opportunities for teaching, learning and professional development (Reyna et al., 2018), but there is a danger of us engaging with the data with little understanding of its provenance. More often than not, discussions about technologies within education, and geography education in particular, gravitate towards a similar set of issues, in particular institutional or individual barriers to engagement with technology (e.g. Walshe, 2017). This also tends to be based around deterministic assumptions that technologies possess inherent qualities that have predictable and positive effects on learning, if used in the correct manner. However, Selwyn (2017) observes that these barriers are not technical issues, but are rather rooted in the social relations, cultures, politics and economics of education.

With this in mind, this book aims to engage with the big picture of geography education in the digital world; it moves beyond the applied perspective of technology and brings the concerns of social science to bear on the use of technology and digital data in geography education contexts. In response to Brooks’ (2016, p.21) question ‘What does it mean to be a [geography] teacher in this day and age?’ this book explores the role of technology within teachers’ professionalism and subject expertise, highlighting the significance of technology in shaping geography in the classroom and engaging with mechanisms through which geography educators might be more proactive in drawing on technologies to support both their own role in knowledge recontextualisation and curriculum-making, and their students’ geographical learning. At the beginning of this new decade in which geography seems increasingly important for young people, Geography Education in the Digital World explores the wider issues and questions as to the role of technology in geography education and how living within a digital world is influencing teacher identity and professionalism, and changing young people's lives.

Geography Education in the Digital World is situated at the intersection between research and practice, drawing on a wide range of theory to consider the role, adoption and potential challenges of a range of digital technologies in furthering geographical education for future generations. It is significant for two reasons: firstly, it explores the relationship between identity and technology, considering themes such as how access to technology has altered young people's lived geographies, teachers’ identities in online spaces, and the challenges of adopting new technology into teacher practice. Secondly, it addresses a gap in the current geography education literature, exploring how a range of ‘new’ technologies, such as geogames and virtual reality, might be used to support geographical learning in and beyond traditional notions of ‘the classroom’, and considering both practical and ethical dimensions of such practice. As such, this book is for geographers, geography educators and geography teacher educators across schools (primary and secondary) and higher education (HE) institutions that are engaging with new and existing technologies to support geographical learning, as well as those wanting to better understand its influence on geography education per se. The book brings together voices that represent these different phases of education, offering perspectives from those with a range of professional identities, encompassing geography education researchers, postgraduate geographers, teacher educators, geography teachers and those involved with our geography subject association in the UK. It explores primary, secondary and HE contexts, and draws on the expertise of early career researchers through to retired members of the geography education community. We have deliberately incorporated perspectives from those working at the boundaries of geography, such as environmental and social sciences, natural sciences and technology education, as well as including authors working within a range of geographical settings, such as the UK, Germany, Ireland and Singapore. The result is a wide-ranging exploration of Geography Education in the Digital World, drawn from multiple perspectives and situated across a variety of contextual boundaries.

The book comprises fourteen chapters organised into four key parts, each of which explores a separate theme pertinent to Geography Education in the Digital World. Within Part I, Professional practice and personal identities in the digital world, authors consider the impact of the digital world broadly on geography, education and geography education in four chapters. In the first, Clare Brooks considers how the use of online social spaces, including for teacher-to-teacher interaction and support, might affect geography teachers’ subject identity and professional practice. Clare describes teachers’ harvesting of resources from a range of online sources as a form of curation, arguing that the notion of curation can nourish teacher identity as it enforces the importance of professional values, and that which teachers consider to be important. In the second, Steve Puttick continues to consider teacher engagement with digital technologies, revisiting debates surrounding the challenges of technology and reframing them in the light of teachers’ knowledge recontextualisation and curriculum-making. In the third chapter, Nicola Walshe, Paul Driver and Mandy-Jane Keenoy consider how immersive 360-degree video technology might be used to navigate the theory-practice divide, particularly as a mechanism for supporting trainee teachers to understand the intersection between geography knowledge and pedagogical understanding, or pedagogical content knowledge. In the final chapter of this part, Lauren Hammond then critically examines how access to technology (specifically Web 2.0) has altered children's geographies, drawing out implications for how, and why, these changes (and children's geographies more broadly) are of value to geography education in schools.

Part II explores Geographical sources and connections in the digital world, where authors grapple with how the digital world is changing what lies within the purview of geography educators and students, and the implications for enhancing geographical education of these future generations of geographers. In the first chapter in this part, Margaret Roberts reflects on geographical sources in the digital world, in particular exploring concerns of disinformation, and consideration of representation and reliability of sources; Margaret critically examines use of various sources within geography education, asking what makes high-quality geographical sources and how they can best support geographical learning in and beyond the classroom. In the second chapter in this part, Rory Padfield draws on work undertaken in university geography contexts to consider virtual learning communities, with a specific focus on their potential for building inter-school and HE partnerships. In particular, Rory reveals that this approach to supporting partnership provides meaningful engagement between students from Indonesia and the UK, allowing them to engage critically with their assumptions about development and, thereby, using technology to support decolonisation of knowledge within the classroom. In the final chapter in this part, Francesca Fearnley considers the use of social media as a tool for geographers and geography educators; drawing on contemporary examples from both human and physical geography, Francesca argues that social media presents a range of valuable opportunities for future generations of geographers to learn new skills, develop their repertoire of methods for geographical research, and ask questions that enhance their capacity to think geographically.

Part III comprises three chapters exploring Geospatial technologies in the digital world, in particular the use of geographical information systems (GIS). While there is general consensus within the academy that GIS has a place within school geography (e.g. Bednarz, 2004; Kerski et al., 2013; Bearman et al., 2016), and national curricula across the world reflect this, research suggests that development of GIS within school contexts remains inconsistent (e.g. Walshe, 2017). Within this context, the chapters in this part explore three very different dimensions of GIS. In the first, Grace Healy considers insights from professional discourse on GIS within the UK context as a mechanism for exploring geography teachers’ repertoire of experience; Grace argues that teachers and researchers need to work collectively to capitalise upon the opportunities and address the challenges of GIS. In the second, Mary Fargher and Grace Healy analyse the potential of WebGIS in the development of geographical knowledge, ultimately making a case to consider how teachers can embed GIS within their repertoire of practice, so as to ensure students are not denied their curriculum entitlement to GIS or the epistemic access afforded by geospatial technologies. In the final chapter, Susan Pike considers GIS for young people's participatory geography, drawing on work across primary and secondary geography schools in Ireland, and highlighting the potential for GIS to develop students’ informed perspectives about local geographical issues and support active citizenship.

Within Part IV, four chapters explore Geographical fieldwork in the digital world, in particular considering the extent to which developing technologies support students’ geographical learning through fieldwork. In the first chapter, Rebecca Kitchen considers the potential of using mobile virtual reality, particularly Google Expeditions, to enhance fieldwork experiences in school geography. Rebecca explicates how virtual reality can help physical fieldtrips to become embedded within students’ geographical education, so that fieldwork becomes much more than a one-off experience. In the second, Chew-Hung Chang looks broadly at mobile technologies and fieldwork, arguing how and why the use of mobile technologies and learning in the field need to be developed in tandem, and illuminating the gaps for future research and practice, including cross-fertilisation of ideas between school and academic geography. In the third chapter in this part, Gary Priestnall draws on experience from university-level geography teaching to consider the opportunities and challenges of augmented reality for school geography, particularly supporting children's understanding of maps and landscapes through techniques such as digital terrain modelling. Within the final chapter of this part, Steffen Schaal presents a detailed account of how the use of location-based games can develop geographical and environmental learning, with a particular focus on field-based technologies.

Within the concluding chapter of the book in Part V, we draw on the notion of teachers’ curriculum-making (Lambert and Biddulph, 2015), developed throughout many of the earlier chapters, to explore the way that the digital world shapes student, teacher and school subject within the context of the discipline of geography. This includes how teachers ought to be empowered as professionals to navigate this digital world in their curriculum-making, as well as how they might help students navigate this digital world themselves. We finish by questioning how geography education might need to prepare for the post-digital world in which the digital is inextricably integrated within teachers’ and students’ everyday lives.

References

1. Bearman, N., Jones, N., André, I., Cachinho, H.A. and DeMers, M., 2016. The future role of GIS education in creating critical spatial thinkers. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 40 (3), pp.394–408.
2. Bednarz, S.W., 2004. Geographic information systems: A tool to support geography and environmental education? GeoJournal, 60 (2), pp.191–199.
3. Brooks, C., 2016. Teacher Subject Identity in Professional Practice: Teaching with a Professional Compass. London: Routledge.
4. Kerski, J.J., Demirci, A. and Milson, A.J., 2013. The global landscape of GIS in secondary education. Journal of Geography, 112 (6), pp.232–247.
5. Lambert, D. and Biddulph, M., 2015. The dialogic space offered by curriculum-making in the process of learning to teach, and the creation of a progressive knowledge-led curriculum. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 43 (3), pp.210–224.
6. Reyna, J., Hanham, J. and Meier, P., 2018. The internet explosion, digital media principles and implications to communicate effectively in the digital space. E-Learning and Digital Media, 15 (1), pp.35–52.
7. Selwyn, N., 2013. Education in a Digital World: Global Perspectives on Technology and Education. Abingdon: Routledge.
8. Selwyn, N., 2017. Education and Technology: Key Issues and Debates. London: Bloomsbury.
9. Walshe, N., 2017. Developing trainee teacher practice with geographical information systems (GIS). Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 41 (4), pp.608–628.

Part I

Professional practice and personal identities in the digital world

Chapter 2

Teacher identity, professional practice and online social spaces

Clare Brooks

Introduction

Online social spaces are ubiquitous now for many people, not just teachers. Different sectors of society have found ways of using various online platforms for different forms of engagement, communication and interaction. Online spaces have been particularly useful for professional networks, especially for professionals who consider themselves isolated or peripheral. As such, for many new teachers engaging in online social spaces is as natural as hanging out in the staff room, or socialising ‘down the pub’. However, we also know from public accounts of trolling and cyber-bullying that people can behave differently online. The public nature of online social spaces can lead to professional ‘performance’ of attitudes and opinions, as well as practices. S...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword by David Lambert
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction: Navigating the digital world as geographers and geography educators
• PART I Professional practice and personal identities in the digital world
• PART II Geographical sources and connections in the digital world
• PART III Geospatial technologies in the digital world
• PART IV Geographical fieldwork in the digital world
• PART V Conclusion
• Index