Volume 23 Number 2
The National Center for Research in Geography Education’s
Transformative Research in Geography Education Grant Program
Outcomes of 2019 Grantee Projects
Dr. Michael Solem
This special issue of Research in Geographic Education is part of a series highlighting the results of projects funded by the transformative research program. The fourth and final cohort of transformative research grantees began their 12- month projects in July 2019. Each group focused on a different priority area of research identified by the Road Map Project, yet all featured collaborations between geographers and education researchers from other disciplines. Teachers, students, and educational policymakers also participated in these efforts.
Notes
1. NSF Award BCS-1560862
The Role of Libraries in Geography and GIS Education: Conversations to Community
Jessica G. Benner & Emma R. Slayton
This paper describes the Role of Libraries in Geography and GIS Education project, a study funded by the National Center for Research in Geography Education’s Research Coordination Network grant. The grant allowed us to formalize the project, fund events, foster conversation, and promote the project. Our research highlights libraries as uniquely situated to support and reinforce geography and GIS education received in the classroom due to an ongoing commitment to hiring a variety of map and GIS educators and curating a wide range of geospatial data collections.
Understanding Geocomputation Education: A Survey and Syllabi Informed Review
Forrest J. Bowlick, Courtney Thompson, Chloe Thompson, Cameryn Cox, Brendan Clark, Nicholas Drummy, Julia Fox, Alanna Grady, Lauren Musshorn & Coline Dony
Geocomputation is an interdisciplinary area of practice, intersecting at least three core areas: geographic and spatial analysis, computational approaches, and high performance computing power. Along with the affordances of geographic information science (GIS), geography, spatial data, programming, and computation, geocomputation serves as a merger in different ways and forms to produce investigations into spatial science and geography with computational assistance. We explore the nature of teaching and learning in this variant and rapidly changing geocomputation education space through survey and syllabi review of geocomputation courses. In analyzing and summarizing responses and syllabus content, we find an area of educational practice based on a rough agglomeration of GIS, computer science, and programming, but with divergent approaches, resources, and learning methods within course structures. Given the general review here of the form of function of geocomputation courses, we present a community focused resource to continue this transformative work of understanding and linking how this area of practice functions.