“If geography is prose, maps are iconography." — Lennart Meri

Sowing the seeds of geographic literacy often finds rocky, uncultivated soil.  One need only review the findings of the latest study conducted by Roeper Public Affairs to appreciate the level of spatial ignorance among young Americans. According to the survey, only 37% of them can find Iraq on a map, although American troops have been there since 2003. Twenty percent think Sudan is in Asia, even though the Darfur region of that nation has been the focus of repeated media attention. Half cannot locate New York on a map (National Geographic Society 2006). Quite frankly, Americans ─ sadly, students in particular ─ are more lost on their own planet than the characters on the popular television program. How reminiscent of Thomas à Kempis’ observation in De imitatione Christi (c. 1418): “Qua vado illic es.” (Wherever you go, there you are.)

The suitability of geographic information systems (GIS) as an effective tool to remediate this problem has been well-documented since the 1980’s.  The widespread use of computer architectures to process geographic metadata has convincingly transformed geography into a legitimate spatial science and empowers GIS users with the tools to explore the intersections of the manmade and natural worlds. “Much of geography's power lies in the insights it sheds on the nature and meaning of the evolving spatial arrangements and landscapes that make up the world in which we live.” (Murphy 1998)  And yet, GIS is terra incognita for the vast majority of social science teachers, who rarely enroll in geography courses for certification.  To jumpstart implementation requires an infusion of external expertise.

In  the summer of 2001, after having been recruited to serve as a cartographer for a nationwide project associated with the Lewis and Clark Expedition Bicentennial, I approached a small pilot group of matriculating 7^th grade students to offer them seats in a new course — GIS 1, which would focus on gaining proficiency in the use of ArcView 3.2™.  If GIS was to work its magic in my school, I would need to take the lead in modeling the tricks.  The students’ tech-savvy backgrounds and enthusiasm for the software quickly produced results, as they navigated the functions and parlance with relative ease, despite the sometimes steep learning curve.   After just two months of intensive instruction, they were ready for field work.  Their discoveries would surprise almost everyone and foster unforeseen opportunities and new insights.

A seemingly inauspicious and brief assignment to practice uploading GPS waypoints would prove more long-lived than imagined.  I chose to liberate GIS from the classroom as soon as I could reasonably arrange for it.  The students needed to solve “real world” problems and test authentic hypotheses in the field. In October 2001 the class ventured to a large nearby cemetery, founded in 1888 and reported to contain unidentified remains exhumed from the original graveyard one-half mile away.  Their assigned problem revolved around two geospatial questions in need of GIS answers: In what sequence did the city exhume the graves? And in what pattern, if discernible, were the remains re-interred?

Students take GIS to the field to solve real-world problems. Here they catalog a local cemetary and help solve mysteries of unmarked graves.

The students created metadata records for every grave in the Normal Hill Cemetery dating from before 1889 by searching through the more than 19,000 plots now located on the grounds. Using Garmin 12 GPS receivers, they marked each of the selected graves as a waypoint and uploaded that data into ArcView as .txt files that could be sorted and displayed as separate layers to discern possible spatial patterns.  More than 120 graves appeared for the period 1867 – 1888.

This cemetery plat used GIS to discern spatial patterns.

When projected onto a centerline plan for the city and disaggregated into four time periods, the data produced a “scatterplot” of sorts and made it abundantly clear that the most likely scenario involved the removal and reburying of the freshest and best-marked graves, enhanced by an affiliation with the Masonic Lodge, leaving other exhumations to the uncertainties of probing with rods or happenstance.  The data also confirmed our suspicions as to the location of the entrance to the old city cemetery, an entrance theretofore unverified.  “Through GIS, geography is actually becoming an organizing tool.”  (Tomlinson 2007)  There had definitely been some semblance of method to the exhumations.  No one had ever seen it before we looked at the cemetery through our GIS “glass.”

However, GIS is decidedly more that GPS units and ArcView™.  What lies beneath the grass has its own pattern.  What you see on the surface is often not a reflection of reality, as I learned after finding myself knee-deep in an unmarked grave that collapsed under my weight.  Seeking to answer a question about the existence of a mass grave of the unidentified from the old grave yard, the class joined with the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) to scan and survey target areas of the cemetery with ground-penetrating radar.

Ground penetrating radar was used to help determine subsurface information and to uncover unmarked graves.

In a stunning rebuttal of urban lore, no mass grave for nameless bodies had ever existed and, to our amazement, a large percentage of the headstones dating from before 1889 showed no evidence of any excavations beneath them.  Where were all the bodies?  A complicated task had suddenly become a complex and thorny issue because the old cemetery is now Pioneer Park, a popular place for weddings, church gatherings, picnics and the site for an annual rock-and-roll festival, with a requisite Biergarten.

Our investigations shifted to the park, and students again utilized radar to identify and map anomalies for future exploration.  The evidence did not long remain hidden. We and all who have reviewed our work are now convinced that more than 150 people are still buried on the grounds, scattered among the trees and playground equipment.  Based on the graves registry developed from primary documents, this number may be one-half of all who were originally buried there.  A fragment from one body had percolated to the surface and was extracted in 2004 near the soil boundary by one of my high school research assistants.  By 2008 our mapping had reached the “bleeding edge” of GIS use in the field with a comprehensive deep soil and tree ring study, undertaken to quantify the residual contamination, if any, from the use of arsenic as an embalming agent in the late 19^th century. (Branting 2009)  

That simple waypoint exercise in 2001 had evolved into an internationally-acclaimed, scholarly, multi-disciplinary pursuit. “Geography is a particularly horizontal technology in the sense that it has wide-ranging applications across the industrial and intellectual landscape.” (Tomlinson)  Asking the right questions regularly opens the doors to powerful student learning experiences both inside and outside the classroom, especially when there is a real mystery involved with the answer.   GIS field work has a potential rich with the prospect of epiphany.   And you need not create an original project to achieve that gratifying “aha” moment.

The Cemetery study provided a long-lasting and in-depth classroom project that pushed the cutting edge of GIS practice.

Dr. Christian Tiberius, a lecturer in geodesy at the Delft (Netherlands) University of Technology, conducted an elegant study of a GPS receiver’s accuracy by marking a predetermined point with 1,712 waypoints taken over a 14 ½  hour period at regular intervals to take advantage of  the varied satellite constellations that form during the day. His project meant to corroborate data obtained by the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which assesses the standard positioning service performance through continuous observations recorded at more than a dozen sites positioned strategically around the country. The FAA reports “95 percent horizontal and vertical accuracies in its quarterly performance reports; these values are usually between 5 and 7 meters and around 8 to 10 meters, respectively.” (Tiberius 2003)  We replicated his study with five receivers over a two-week period and verified his conclusions.  Our analysis of the data opened us to a practical investigation of Bayesian search theory and the “wisdom of crowds,” in our case, using GPS units and the century-old work of Sir Francis Galton.

Concurrent with this panoply of studies and related projects, I initiated, under the auspices of the Lewis and Clark grant, frequent in-service ArcView™ courses for school teachers at many grade levels.  No GIS program will survive without a cadre of participants empowered by good training.  “No GIS can be a success without the right people involved.”  (Tomlinson)  In 2008 we shifted our attention to using the GIS program My World, developed by Northwestern University (Evanston IL) specifically for the middle-school environment, and inaugurated two online GIS classes for the faculty.  (Edelson 2006)  ArcView™ has retained its eminence in the scheme of things, as the reader will soon learn.

The question remains: How can educators graft GIS to the existing curriculum if it is not taught as a stand-alone subject, which I had done in 2001?  As noted above, effective school GIS programs require a network of knowledgeable faculty.  Being an experienced teacher is not enough to maintain success in an educational environment that changes rapidly and holds collaboration to be a sine qua non. Depending on a single GIS practitioner defeats the purpose of professional learning teams.  Several studies have shown that GIS is too often confined to science and geoscience programs. (Bednarz 1997)  This myopic approach fails to consider the power of discovery nested in the GIS metadata. The benefits of cross-curricular and interdisciplinary classroom programs, combining the talents of several teachers, are well-attested, the research findings supporting the positive effects of curriculum integration. (Aschbacher 1991)

This seafloor map is one of many powerful personal discoveries uncovered by GIS.

In our case, we have found success using GIS to give 7^th grade social studies students as grasp of geographic relationships, projections and spatial analysis.  United States history students mine census data to better understand the demographics of our population.  Earth science students explore planetary dynamism through volcanology, seismology, climatology and oceanography.  Life sciences students have extensive libraries of wildlife habitats, both current and historic, on every continent.  We have supplemented our data libraries to include local county layers, paths of exploration, minerals and aquifers, among others. Student enrollment in GIS seminars now exceeds 500 each semester. (Branting 2009)

This emphasis on the middle school curriculum certainly does not preclude GIS from the higher grades.  Far from it.  In 2009, I announced the Pacific Northwest Geography Initiative to organize, implement, assess and maintain pilot GIS programs using ArcView 9.3.1™ in selected regional high schools in Idaho, Oregon and Washington, with the goal of initiating and enhancing geography instruction.   Underwritten by ESRI, this project is granting building licenses to ten (10) regional high schools that commit to the inclusion of geographic information systems in their curriculum as a one-semester, one-section course offering, which may serve as a pre-requisite to subsequent courses that may form a curriculum sequence.  In collaboration with city, county and local governmental agencies, this project coordinates the release of GIS professionals to teach a pilot course in each school, with the simultaneous training of one (1) lead school faculty member for future terms of the GIS course(s) and to offer teacher in-service classes.   I ask you GIS professionals: How can you reach out to your schools to nurture the growth of GIS?

GIS has given new truth to the words of geographer William Hughes:  “Mere names of places...are not geography... know by heart a whole gazetteer full of them would not, in itself, constitute anyone a geographer. Geography has higher aims than this: it seeks to classify phenomena (alike of the natural and of the political world, in so far as it treats of the latter), to compare, to generalize, to ascend from effects to causes, and, in doing so, to trace out the great laws of nature and to mark their influences upon man. This is ‘a description of the world’ ─ that is Geography. In a word Geography is a Science ─ a thing not of mere names but of argument and reason, of cause and effect.” (Hughes 1863)

All things being said, if a sense of space is crucial to personal and global awareness, then GIS is the stable pillar on which to steady our schools’ too-often-ignored geographic curriculum and, for good measure, enrich the scope of several other disciplines.

Endnotes:

1. Meri, Lennart. (1976)  Hõbevalge: Reisikiri tuultest ja muinasluulest [Silver White: Travelogue on the Winds and Ancient Poetry].  Tallnin: Eesti Raamat.
2. National Geographic Literacy Study. (2006) Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Education Foundation.
3. 3. Murphy, Alexander B. (1998) Rediscovering the Importance of Geography.  The Chronicle of Higher Education, 45 (10), October 20, A64.
4. Tomlinson, Roger.  (2007) Thinking About GIS, 3^rd Edition.  Redlands CA: ESRI Press, p. xv.
5. Branting, Steven. (2009) Digitizing a Heritage of Faded Memories ─ A Case Study on Extending Historical Research Capabilities. The History Teacher.  Long Beach CA: Society of History Education.
6. Tomlinson, p. 1.
7. Tiberius, Christian. (2003)  Handheld GPS Accuracy. GPS World. February: pp. 46-51.
8. Tomlinson, loc. cit.
9. Edelson, Daniel. C. and Brown, Matthew. (2006) Designing GIS Software for Education: A Workshop Report for the GIS Community.  Geographic Data in Education Initiative, Northwestern University; Edelson, D. C. and Reiser, B. J. (2006). Making authentic practices accessible to learners: Design challenges and strategies.  In R. K. Sawyer (Ed.), Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 335-354.

10.  Bednarz, Sarah and Ludwig, Gail.  (1997)  “Ten things higher education needs to know about GIS in primary and secondary education.” Transactions in GIS, Volume 2, Number 2, pp. 123-133.

11.  Aschbacher, Pamela. (1991) Humanitas: A Thematic Curriculum.  Educational Leadership 49/2, 16-19; Edgerton, R. (1990)  Survey Feedback from Secondary School Teachers that are Finishing their First Year Teaching from an Integrated Mathematics Curriculum. Washington, DC.

12.  Branting. (2009)  "Calling Off the Hunt for the Snark," URISA News, January/February.

13.  Hughes, William. (1863). The Study of Geography. Lecture delivered at King's College, London by Sir Marc Alexander. Quoted in Baker, J.N.L (1963). The History of Geography. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, p. 66.

• Add New
• Search
• RSS

Comments (1)

• 2009-12-15 02:10:30 | Steven Branting  - Pacfic Northwest Geography Initiative
  As stated in my article, I will entertain proposals from high schools in Idaho, Oregon and Washington to start up GIS courses with ArcView 9.3.1. If possible, I will also try to include Montana, if requests are limited. Please contact me at my email address for a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA).
  Reply

Write comment

Your Contact Details:

Name:

Email: do not notifynotify

Website:

Comment:

Title:

Message:

Security

Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.

Joomla components by Compojoom