Spatial Citizenship education and digital geomedia: composing competences for teacher education and training

Abstract

Based on the idea of Spatial Citizenship, which endeavours to promote individuals' maturity and participation in the geospatial society, we focus on teachers' competence in the field of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) teaching and learning. By employing methods of qualitative social research, we have determined the dimensions and structures of Spatial Citizenship competence which, in turn, were used to create a Spatial Citizenship competence model for teacher education and training. In light of the derived competence framework, we argue for a shift in learning with GIS from the expert-based view to the everyday non-expert use of digital geomedia.

Keywords::

• Spatial Citizenship
• digital geomedia
• Geographic Information Systems
• competence
• teacher education and training

Acknowledgements

Throughout the Spatial Citizenship, project teachers, academics and experts in the field of education from Austria, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Romania and Turkey as well as from Japan and the USA have worked together to bring the idea of Spatial Citizenship into the practice of teaching and learning, see http://www.spatialcitizenship.org. We would like to thank all of them for their inspiring discourse and critical thoughts that have advanced our work on the conception of Spatial Citizenship education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Commission [grant number 517908-LLP-1-2011-1-AT-COMENIUS-CMP].