Nurturing a Geospatially Empowered Next Generation

Introduction And Background

In order to educate the next generation of geographic information system (GIS) users, this chapter organizes all learning objectives based upon the core concepts outlined by Kuhn (2012). These concepts are summarized in Table 1.

This chapter will explain these core concepts using three scenarios on different continents. These scenarios contain the basic structural underpinning for pedagogical units that can be developed by teaching staff for use with their classes and within the locally applicable curricular framework. The scenarios can be generally adapted to a large variety of settings. This approach demonstrates that the questions behind the concepts are the same regardless of the environment in which the learning takes place. However, depending on the context, these questions can be answered in very different ways. To begin, a comprehensive set of available data and tools are presented. Then, the application of some easily accessible tools are demonstrated via the scenarios.