INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SCIENCE, 2017

VOL. 31, NO. 10, 2098–2116

https://doi.org/10.1080/13658816.2017.1334892

Critical GIS pedagogies beyond ‘Week 10: Ethics’

Sarah Elwooda and Matthew Wilsonb
a
Department of Geography, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA; bDepartment of Geography,
University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Over two decades after the scholarly interventions that coalesced Received 11 December 2016
into ‘critical GIS’ as a field within GIScience, critical GIS remains Accepted 16 May 2017
underdeveloped in conversations on teaching and learning. The KEYWORDS
literature on GIScience education has emphasized content more Critical GIS; pedagogy;
than pedagogies – what to teach versus how to teach to move course design; GIScience
students toward particular learning objectives. This emphasis is curriculum
reflected in dominant curricular approaches to critical GIS, in
which questions around the complicated origins and complicit
social, political, and economic relationships of GIS are taken up
as discrete topics, tacked onto instruction that otherwise priori-
tizes technical dimensions of GIScience. We argue that GIScience
coursework must resist such modularization by approaching criti-
cal GIS not as a set of topics, but an orientation to GIS praxis that
‘does’ GIS from within a questioning stance, to ask how we know.
We outline specific curricular shifts and teaching practices we have
used to foster this orientation in GIS students, offering ways of
continually engaging students in practicing this orientation as
they learn strong technical GIScience content. Finally, we trace
the successes, challenges, and tensions sparked by these critical
GIS pedagogies, drawing on student evaluation comments from
our courses and reflecting on broader implications for GIScience
instructors and geography faculty.

1. Introduction
“It got me thinking more about the digital world as a space with politics…”

“Drop 95% of the theory, history, influence on culture and research–if you want that, make a
separate class.”

“Working with community partners encouraged me to be more accountable and set higher
standards for my work than a ‘normal’ course.”

“While I really enjoyed the reading assignments and enjoyed learning the history + future of
GIS, I wish there were more lessons on what ArcGIS is capable of doing.”

Student evaluation comments often focus on less movable aspects of a course: drop the
tests, lose the lectures, stop using group projects. Yet, in courses that step outside the
bounds of students’ prevailing expectations, evaluation comments often pinpoint the

CONTACT Sarah Elwood [email protected]

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SCIENCE 2099

rupture that instructors are attempting to provoke. The quotes above, from student
evaluations of GIScience courses, we teach with a strong critical GIS orientation, chart
the contours of student responses to pedagogies that push them to engage GIS as an
always-interconnected set of technical and social practices.1
GIScience educators have long grappled with teaching and learning challenges:
Integrating GIS into cartography and spatial analysis curricula, balancing technical and
conceptual learning, keeping up with technological change, and mounting rigorous
curricula with limited time, technology, funding resources (Goodchild 1985, Nyerges
and Chrisman 1989). With the advent of ‘GIS and Society’ perspectives (Pickles 1994,
Sheppard 1995), and the coalescing of ‘critical GIS’ (Schuurman 1999), these teaching
and learning debates grew to include questions of how to teach GIS as a socially
constructed technology and mentor GIScience students to understand their work as
societally consequential (Warren 1995). However, as developed in more detail below,
many GIScience curricula incorporate critical GIS as discrete topic areas in bounded
courses modules. While this approach has value (it remains better than the absence of
such a topic), it focuses on what to teach students about critical GIS rather than how to
familiarize students with what it means to do critical GIS as a GIScience practitioner.
A primary contribution of critical GIS has been theorizing GIS and other digital spatial
platforms, spatial data, mapping, and spatial analyses as shaped by recursive relations
between technology/digitality, society, knowing, and knowledge-making (Schuurman
1999, Sheppard 2006, Thatcher et al. 2016). Critical GIS is an approach to GIScience that
is always aware of and responsive to the dynamic interplay of technology, society, and
knowledge/knowing. Yet, there are very few discussions of pedagogies for helping
GIScience students learn what it means to do critical GIS as an orientation to GIS praxis.
We address this crucial gap. We begin by examining the GIS education literature to
identify multiple ways that educators have brought together GIS and ‘the critical’. This
discussion situates our approach to critical GIS as an orientation to GIS praxis that ‘does’
GIS from within a questioning stance about how we know. Next, we discuss key con-
temporary social and technological shifts in GIScience, including the availability of digital
spatial data, the development and use of spatial technologies, and their relations to the
public and private sectors, as these shifts condition GIScience pedagogies, critical or
otherwise. We then explore specific curricular changes and teaching practices that both
respond to these shifts and foster students’ critical GIS orientation, drawing illustrative
examples from the GIScience curricula and courses in which we are involved. Finally, we
explore the successes, challenges, and tensions in our efforts to practice these critical
GIS pedagogies, reflecting on student evaluation comments.

2. Tracing ‘the critical’ in GIScience teaching and learning

Discussions of teaching and learning in GIScience now extend over three decades. The
1980s saw development of model curricula that integrated conceptual and technical GIS
learning into geography and cartography curricula (Goodchild 1985, Poiker 1985, Sui
1995). In the United States, the 1990s and early 2000s saw national curriculum devel-
opment and coordination efforts in the National Center for Geographic Information and
Analysis (NCGIA) Core Curriculum and the University Consortium for Geographic
Information Science/American Association of Geographers (UCGIS/AAG) GIS and
2100 S. ELWOOD AND M. WILSON

Technology Body of Knowledge (Goodchild and Kemp 1992, DiBiase et al. 2006, Kemp
and Unwin 1997). More recently, scholar-educators in geography and other fields are
grappling with the pedagogical challenges of mobile and web-based spatial technolo-
gies, crowdsourced and big data, and cyberGIS (Abernathy 2011, Manson et al. 2014),
and shifting structures of higher education under fiscal austerity (Sinton 2012, Unwin
et al. 2012). Persistent teaching and learning challenges include the rapid pace of
technological change, and balancing technological learning with conceptual learning
about the storage, manipulation, representation, analysis, and sharing of geospatial
information in (evermore diverse) digital environments (Poiker 1985, Nyerges and
Chrisman 1989, Lloyd 2001, Tate and Unwin 2009, Roth et al. 2014, Wikle and Fagin
2014). Others have debated vocationalism, especially how and whether curricula should
respond to student assumptions that future employability rests on specific technological
skills and platform and language literacies (Goodchild 1985, Whyatt et al. 2009, Seremet
and Chalkley 2015).
This work has undergirded development of robust GIScience higher education
around the world (Goodchild and Kemp 1992, Kemp and Unwin 1997, Liu and Shen
2014, Plessis and Van Niekerk 2014). Yet, the bulk of writing has focused on curriculum –
what topics, skills, and concepts GIScience learners should master and how to scaffold
them through a student’s education. Far less attention has been given to pedagogies –
how to teach in order to foster particular learning outcomes. Most pedagogy-focused work
has examined how constructivist pedagogies, including project-based learning, activity-
based learning, experiential and community service learning, deepen students’ concep-
tual and technical learning, collaboration skills, and project management abilities
(Warren 1995, Esnard et al. 2001, Barcus and Muellenhaus 2010, Robinson 2010,
Bearman et al. 2016). Several show how the iterative cycles of applied practice and
reflection in constructivist pedagogies help students connect conceptual and technical
learning, foster insights into societal implications of GIS, and prepare them to engage
ethical issues in GIS praxis (Elwood 2009, Robinson 2010, Wilson 2015a).
Within discussions of teaching and learning in GIScience, ‘critical’ approaches have
taken multiple forms. These different groundings of ‘critical’ in GIScience are not mutually
exclusive – they hold exciting complementarities. First, there is a robust conversation
about critical spatial thinking (National Research Council 2006, Bearman et al. 2016). Here,
the ‘critical’ is harnessed to spatial reasoning, understood as forms of analytic thought that
use spatial concepts like distance or scale to understand spatial processes or relations, or
to evaluate arguments that make spatial claims. This literature posits a dialectical relation-
ship: critical spatial thinking is foundational to GIScience, and GIScience and technologies
are central to developing critical spatial thinking capabilities (Hespanha et al. 2009, Kim
and Bednarz 2013). Related work has explored how geospatial technologies, especially
web-based platforms, can be used to enhance students’ development of these spatial
literacies (DeMers and Vincent 2008, Milson and Earle 2008).
A second intersection of criticality, GIS and education manifests in literature on use of
GIS within critical pedagogies. ‘Critical pedagogies’ here references anti-racist and
feminist, pedagogies oriented toward student learning about structures of oppression
and reflexivity on their own position in these structures (Hooks 1994, Giroux 2011, Mott
et al. 2015). Studies in primary, secondary, and higher education suggest that spatial
technologies are media through which students come to understand how sociospatial
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SCIENCE 2101

processes and relationships (gender, race, class, age/generation, political economy, and
more) produce oppression and inequality (Pacheco and Velez 2009, Tate and Hogrebe
2011, Gryl and Jekel 2012, Mitchell and Elwood 2013, Philip et al. 2016).
A third encounter between GIScience and ‘the critical’ – and our primary focus here –
relates to ‘critical GIS’ as a subfield of GIScience. This critical GIS theorizes and engages
geospatial data and technologies as socially constructed, deploys them in ways that
challenge inequalities, and creatively expands forms of spatial knowledge and knowing
in digital environments (Schuurman 1999, 2001, Sheppard 2006). When critical GIS was
coalescing in the late 1990s, the teaching of GIS largely involved modules that built from
an introductory understanding of cartographic representation and moved through
increasingly complex spatial analyses, often with case studies and predetermined data
and analytical parameters (Chang 2001, Bolstad 2002), or exploring the implications of
different spatial data models, like vector and raster (Couclelis 1992). As questions around
the social implications of GIS emerged through the 1990s, some questioned whether GIS
instruction had a place in critically minded geography departments (Lake 1992). We and
others teaching GIS often debated how to resist undergraduates who ‘only want to learn
buttons and menus’ or how to motivate students to learn about the social implications
of geospatial technologies. Neither the teaching of critical GIS topics (instruction around
the history of the GIS and Society movement, etc.) nor a pedagogy of critical GIS (the
doing of GIS from within a questioning stance around how we know) were well articu-
lated at the time.
Through the 2000s, critical GIS began to enter GIScience education, largely handled
as advanced topics added to an existing traditional curriculum, an approach evident in
some national initiatives. The GIScience & Technology Body of Knowledge (BoK), for
example, includes units on social critique, ethics, privacy, social foundations of GIS, and
philosophical foundations including metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology (DiBiase
et al. 2006, UCGIS 2016). The BoK and related efforts tend to treat critical GIS as a set of
topics or propositions about GIS to add onto the larger curriculum. In this ‘Week 10:
Ethics’ approach, topics like privacy, ethics, and academic/industry histories of GIS
appear in the final stage of a class. Importantly, this approach familiarizes students
with societal concerns and critiques of GISystems and GIScience. However, it leaves
unanswered the question of what it means to do critical GIS and how to structure
students’ learning with and about geospatial data and technologies toward this goal.
A few scholars have written toward this gap.2 Warren (1995) develops an approach
for teaching GIS as socially constructed. She offered students software training and
social theoretical concepts for thinking about GIS/spatial data as socially situated, then
explicitly engaged them in identifying and reflecting on how these concepts manifest in
their GIS application projects. We use similar approaches in our own projects-based
courses, using students’ collaborative data development, analysis, and mapping efforts
with community-based organizations as the basis for reflection on questions about the
shifting politics and authority of geospatial data and technologies, changing attentional
economies for community actors, and more (Elwood 2009, Wilson 2015a). Ricker and
Thatcher (2017) constructivist approach to CyberGIS teaching is designed to bring
students directly up against critical techno-social concerns and consequences associated
with their use of spatial big data (privacy, data access, data quality, interoperability, etc.).
These papers detail GIScience pedagogies that engage students in using spatial data
2102 S. ELWOOD AND M. WILSON

and technologies in ways that trace social and technological influences on knowledge
and knowing, foreground questions of what can and cannot be known through digital
spatial practices, and respond to the ways that these practices produce power and
inequality. The projects and courses they outline take up critical GIS pedagogies as an
orientation toward doing spatial analysis and geovisual representation.
More specifically, these critical GIS pedagogies are a way of thinking and doing spatial
data and technologies that are robustly engaged in building students’ technological
capabilities and constantly foregrounding questions about how we know through the
digital and spatial, where these forms of knowing come from, and what the conse-
quences are. Wilson (2009) articulates this approach to doing GIS from within a ques-
tioning stance around how we know as a ‘technopositionality’, a framing that requires
critical engagement to be in the terms of the technology. Extending work in feminist
theory that sought to establish the importance of positionality in research, technoposi-
tionality recognizes the distinct responsibility in critical GIS praxis to engage in critique
through the terms of the technology itself. Therefore, it is not sufficient to situate the
social contexts and implications of GIS in the classroom, but rather we need to enroll the
practical and technical aspects of GIS use and development directly into modules that
address its history of development and implications of use. In doing so, hardware,
software, analytic techniques, and data/representation are always presented as both
technical and social. From these origins, critical GIS pedagogies aim beyond only
building students’ conceptual apparatus for critiquing GIS or explaining its social and
political implications, toward instilling this technopositionality as their orientation to
doing GIS.
These discussions of critical GIS pedagogies as an orientation to GIS practice are an
important step forward in GIScience teaching and learning. Yet some of these interven-
tions were authored years ago in very different societal and technological contexts in
GIS and others focus on single courses at advanced level. This prompts two pressing
questions that structure the remainder of this paper: (1) What innovations and transfor-
mations in GIScience and the world of geospatial data and technologies might create
new openings and closures for critical GIS pedagogies? (2) (How) might we help
students develop a critical GIS technopositionality throughout their GIScience education?
We argue that critical GIS pedagogies can and should happen at two levels: Curricula
that are responsive to contemporary socio-technological conditions in GIS, and syllabus/
activity-level interventions that help students become aware of and responsive to the
ways that these socio-technological shifts condition knowledge, knowing, power, and
impact.

3. Teaching within the changing socio-technological conditions of

contemporary GIScience
The rapidly changing socio-technological conditions of GIS development and geospatial
technology use present both challenge and opportunity in contemporary GIScience
education. Far from being removed from these shifts, critical GIS interrogates these
conditions, as situated within social, political, and economic relations. These changes are
technical and social, highlighting questions around what we can know and who can
know, power, domination, emancipation, and so on. To be clear, more conventional
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SCIENCE 2103

teaching in GIScience also must adapt to these changes. However, we suggest that it is
the unique responsibility of critical GIS pedagogy to present students with exercises that
directly examine these shifts, to better understand the social, political, and economic
implications of what might seem like merely an update or revision to a technical
functionality.
In what follows, we identify five key developments that we argue catalyze particular
opportunities and challenges of GIS education in the contemporary moment: (1) Rapid
and sustained shifts in software and computational environments, (2) changing techno-
cultures among new generations of students and instructors, (3) a reorganization of
spatial data and the infrastructures that support these data, (4) changing involvements
by the geospatial industry, and (5) structural shifts in the academy. These five develop-
ments are key sites for rethinking the bounds of GIScience curriculum and pedagogies.
We seek not to comprehensively detail all the new parameters that condition GIS
education, but to underscore how the teaching of technique and critique are both
subject to these conditions. After offering our observations on these shifts, we detail
our pedagogical response in Section 4.
First, the technological ecosystem supporting GIScience curriculum has seen key
changes, including the open movement (in data, systems, and practice), the expansion
of corporate players, and the proliferation of protocols and standards that support a
growing and competitive geospatial industry. The pace of these changes may require us
to de-tether technical changes (new database techniques, new interfaces/interactions,
and coding libraries that support them) from broader course concepts such as the
power of the map, the military roots of geospatial innovation, or the fracturing of the
digital divide along lines of expertise and knowledge and access. Furthermore, the
availability of robust yet simple web-based mapping platforms has meant that students
can learn principles of cartography outside of a desktop GIS environment. As such, many
of our students now enter GIScience courses with confidence about how to use a variety
of geospatial technologies (whether in the browser or as stand-alone mobile applica-
tions). This presents an important opportunity for a ‘running start’ that familiarizes them
with the ever-expanding breadth of platforms, devices, data sources, data types, and
coding languages that will be part of their future as GIScience practitioners, whether as
developers, activists, researchers, analysts in the public, private or nonprofit sector, or
educators.
Second, students are embedded in changing cultures of interaction prompted by
mobile devices and social media, transforming what we can assume about their com-
putational literacy, with implications for GIScience instruction. For instance, we find that
the prevalence of mobile device and touchscreen interactions means that our students
frequently do not understand and cannot access underlying file structures of these
systems. When they download a music file or write a post on social media, their work
with these interfaces does not require an understanding of where those files and data
reside. Ever more ‘user friendly’ interfaces in which a single click initiates a multifaceted
set of processes (such as the intentional closed design of Apple products) mean that
many students do not already understand basic digital infrastructure behind these
screens. Every term, we work with comparatively computer-savvy students who can,
for example, download a comma-separated values (CSV) file from the US Census
website, but may not realize that this file is now stored on their local machine, not
2104 S. ELWOOD AND M. WILSON

know how to find these downloaded files, nor how to access them via other local or
networked environments. While our students now generally have greater confidence
with a wider range of digital platforms and applications than a decade ago, we note key
gaps in basic systems-level knowledge still needed for GIS application, and find that we
devote more time to reinforcing these skills than in the past.
Third, just as the technological ecosystem has rapidly expanded and the cultures of
interaction with these systems have shifted, so too has the type, sources, and forms of
data used in GIScience. For most of the last 25 years, lab and project work in GIScience
courses relied on datasets generated by municipalities, state governments, and federal
sources. Data for GIS teaching and learning largely meant ‘authoritative’ datasets pro-
duced by and obtained from these institutions, usually bearing certain standards around
accuracy, reliability, metadata, and appropriateness of use. So-called spatial ‘big data’ and
crowdsourced spatial data have changed the game. Teaching and learning for contem-
porary GIScience practice now means engaging a much greater range of data sources,
structures, and formats. GIS learners now need to know not only how to obtain data
through the traditional channels of authoritative data curation (public agencies, online
data clearinghouses, spatial data infrastructures) but also how to produce their own data
with mobile apps, set up online map interfaces that support data entry, scrape data from
the web, download crowdsourced data produced by distant others, and much more.
Fourth, the previous three transformations have ushered in a range of new corporate
actors (Leszczynski 2015, Wilson 2015b), with implications for GIScience education. More GIS
educators have begun to peek outside Esri products, configuring learning environments
where students may choose from a variety of private sector and open-source mapping
platforms. This shift feels tectonic at times and raises new tensions around whether or to
what degree GIScience students must be trained in Esri, the dominant platform for several
decades. Furthermore, as the business models of computing have shifted, GIScience edu-
cators are grappling with how to respond to the ongoing subscription costs of the ‘software
as services’ model that is increasingly replacing ‘software as product’ approaches where the
initial purchase guaranteed updates more or less in perpetuity. Other options include open
source platforms such as Leaflet, ‘freeware’ like Google Maps, or ‘freemium’ software/
services access such as Carto (where limited functionality, processing power, or data storage
is offered for free and full access and functionality requires subscription fees). These
different pathways are consequential for GIScience teaching and learning, particularly
given the private sector ownership of much digital spatial data captured through everyday
social life. Learning activities that use ‘freeware’ and ‘freemium’ platforms often in essence
require students to trade personal profiles for mapping platform access. Private sector
freeware like Google’s suite of spatial tools can change substantially with little advance
notice – a cost of time and effort to faculty and students alike. Newer or more experimental
open source tools may have thinner support resources and less long-term stability (though
of course some open source resources like Leaflet have well-established user communities
and rich documentation).
Finally, the realignment of the public sector with private interests has further com-
plicated the terrain in which we navigate these shifts and their implications for GIScience
teaching and learning. Public universities in the US and elsewhere remain in fiscal crisis.
Departments are under pressure to teach increasing numbers of students and demon-
strate specific preprofessional skills that students are learning. Educators are increasingly
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SCIENCE 2105

exposed to the neoliberalization of public goods, expected to professionalize curricula

while expanding course offerings by adjunct and itinerant instructors who teach ever-
larger classes. Hard choices about sustaining our programs lie at the intersection of
dwindling university funds and potential resources from corporate or military sources
that may prescript the kinds of GIS futures for which we are preparing our students. The
outsourcing of formerly university-owned computing infrastructures to corporate tech
giants and their subscription-based cloud services raises further questions about how
market logics circulate within curricula and to what effect.
GIScience educators are clearly well positioned to think through the design of
curricula in response to these shifts, to prepare graduates who have a different range
of aptitudes, knowledge, and skill sets than in prior generations.3 The proliferation of
locative technologies in (some) everyday lives means that many students now enter our
GIScience curricula with data and technological (il)literacies not present a decade ago.
These shifts have also meant that interest in GIS and digital mapping is expanding
beyond traditional GIScience classrooms, for instance in the digital humanities and more
socially engaged social sciences.4
Adapting GIScience curricula to respond to these shifts is an urgent challenge for all
GIS educators, not just those who teach from a critical GIS orientation. For instance, it
may be necessary to expand the introductory pathways that lead into GIScience curri-
cula. In our departments, we have each developed first/second year courses (GEOG258:
Digital Geographies and GEO109: Digital Mapping) that use spatial platforms such as
Google Maps Engine, SocialExplorer, Carto, and QGIS. These new courses ensure that
geography students enter introductory GIScience courses familiar with basic concepts
for data acquisition and manipulation, cartographic representation, and spatial analysis.
At University of Kentucky, traditional cartographic concepts (such as visual variables and
levels of measurement) are now part of revised Intro and Advanced GIS (GEO309 and
GEO409) courses that now relate these design principles to interactive web cartography,
informed by new media studies. At University of Washington, GEOG360: GIS and
Mapping now includes concepts and activities through which students compare and
contrast narrative cartographies approaches from digital humanities with traditional
spatial analysis and Cartesian approaches to geovisualization.
As another example of how our GIS pedagogies have coevolved with shifts in
contemporary GIScience, in early iterations of our advanced community projects courses
(GEOG469: GIS Workshop; GEO509: Community Mapshop), projects typically supported
community partners’ access to spatial data and software that were too expensive,
technically demanding or institutionally restricted for them to access on their own.
Students developed project management skills for ‘translating’ community-articulated
questions into the project workflow and analytic models supported by conventional GIS.
Today, Workshop and Mapshop more often support community partners in evaluating
and learning to use multiple mobile and online data collection, spatial analysis, and
geovisualization platforms. Key project management skills now include fluency in hand-
ling data and visual outputs across multiple media or software environments, and
building strategies for partners to sustain their geospatial capabilities amidst constant
change.
We point to these curriculum-level transformations in GIScience education in our
departments as grounded examples of how shifts in the socio-technological terrain of
2106 S. ELWOOD AND M. WILSON

contemporary GIScience conditions the possibilities for teaching GIScience, whether or

not critical in approach. We do not offer them as models to be transferred wholesale to
other departments nor to suggest that they represent a complete recipe for adjusting
GIScience curricula to the current moment. Rather, critical GIS praxis entails reflexivity on
what and how we know through spatial data and technologies in the current moment
and GIScience curricular transformations like the ones we have sketched are indeed part
of what it means to ‘do’ critical GIS in our teaching. In other words, we propose that
critical GIS pedagogies take up these shifts directly, to build exercises to better under-
stand the implications for these rapid changes, to ask how we know.

4. Beyond week 10: an integrated approach to critical GIS teaching and

learning
The openings and closures that are applying pressure on GIScience education are an
opportunity to rethink longstanding traditions around GIScience instruction and experi-
ment with new approaches informed by critical GIS praxis. We support resources like the
UCGIS GIS&T BoK as significant inventories of the range of technical, conceptual, and
applied knowledge that GIScience and technology learners should develop. However,
we believe that multiple models of GIScience pedagogy are possible and indeed,
necessary. In what follows, we draw upon our own experiences to argue for multi-
sited interventions ranging from specific learning goals and student aptitudes, to
syllabus-level interventions within multiple classes, to the kinds of classes that are
imagined to be part of ‘the GIS curriculum’ and the pathways by which students can
move through them. We emphasize that pedagogies for critical GIS are contingent and
that standardization is neither possible nor necessary. GIScience curricula are shaped by
their broad societal and technological contexts, as well as by departmental histories,
faculty expertise and stage of career, and intellectual alliances and struggles.5
Our own critical GIS pedagogies emerged in geography departments that had exist-
ing GIScience curricula and were open to critical GIS approaches, but no existing model.
For Elwood in the early 2000s, a combined research/education grant project created
momentum and legitimacy for critical GIS interventions in the curriculum – a new urban
GIS class aimed at grassroots spatial data and technology needs/practices and a social/
spatial justice GIS practicum course. As she moved to other departments, these new
courses ‘traveled’ to other GIS curricula. For Wilson in 2009, initial interventions largely
occurred as activity and content revisions first piloted within existing introductory and
advanced GIS course and under the cloak of ‘special topics’ course designations.6 Since
these beginnings, collaboration and alliances with our GIScience and human geography
colleagues have helped us rework undergraduate curricular pathways to create capacity
to learn how to do critical GIS, as well as design a suite of courses at all levels that can
nurture critical GIS aptitudes and impulses throughout students’ college careers.
More than a listing of what a student of critical GIScience knows, our critical GIS
pedagogies involve interventions in three areas: (1) In the lesson plan, aimed at parti-
cular kinds of student learning goals, (2) in the design and implementation of the
syllabus, or the arc of the entire course, and (3) in the specific paths between and
through courses in our department and in coordination with departments/units across
the university. We do not propose these as the best practices for a critical GIS pedagogy,
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SCIENCE 2107

but rather as illustrative of the approaches, interventions, and experiments that have
advanced critical GIS praxis within the contexts and cultures of our departments.
First, we turn to the much-debated question of technical ‘skills’ – students’ familiarity
with particular geospatial platforms, data management practices, analytic or representa-
tional operations, and ways of implementing them in various software environments or
coding languages. Critical GIS pedagogies must ensure that students develop robust
training in these arenas, just as all GIScience education has long sought to do. However,
starting from a pervasive attention to the contemporary arrangements and workings of
software and data industries in which GIScience practice occurs (our own, our students,
our community partners) prompts us to approach skills learning differently today. Ten to
fifteen years ago, the world of GIS revolved around a limited set of desktop software
whose spatial data management, analysis, and visualization possibilities were fairly
consistent. We lectured on these concepts and students practiced them in structured
lab activities with predetermined data.
The contemporary proliferation of geospatial analysis and mapping platforms and the
ever-changing functionality and requirements of freeware call for a dramatically differ-
ent approach. It is no longer possible (if it ever was) to specify a fully known and
complete recipe of software and techniques that a professional GIScience practitioner
definitively must have and then set out to ensure that students know the recipe. Instead,
our approach to skill-building now involves students in learning new interfaces or
platforms through individual and collaborative exploration without detailed step-by-
step instructions, but with instructions for how to identify and productively engage
online user forums, help files, etc. We involve them in shifting data across multiple
platforms and iterating similar analyses in multiple environments. In introductory
courses, we ask students to set up mobile survey questions in an app like Fulcrum,
collect data with their app, export the data in a variety of file formats (shapefile, DBF,
KML, GeoJSON), import the data to multiple environments (ArcMap, Carto, QGIS, Google
MyMaps), visualize the data in map and infographic form, and where possible, carry out
simple spatial analyses. These activities have students build multimedia representations,
work back and forth between mapping platforms, try to build infographics using design
software, experiment with graphic strategies for the attentionally overloaded public, and
most importantly, ‘tinker and fail’ (Wilson 2017).
From the perspective of technology-focused learning goals, this approach is oriented
toward building key aptitudes students need for contemporary GIScience praxis: famil-
iarizing themselves with unfamiliar technologies quickly amidst constant innovation,
identifying support resources, and using them effectively, transferring data or apps
across multiple environments, evaluating multiple candidate software, and identifying
relevant differences in platform capabilities. In this model, our role as instructors shifts
from imparting concepts to guiding iterative exploratory learning activities and critical
reflexive learning. Increasingly, we focus class time and writing prompts on asking
students to compare and reflect upon the possibilities, limits, outputs and implications
of their data, platform, analytic, and representational choices. Specifically, why might
you choose QGIS over ArcMap for this particular application? How and why were the
data generated from two students’ mobile surveys different, even though everyone was
prompted to focus their survey on the same issue? What eventual representational
possibilities are gained or lost if we export the data in shapefile versus GeoJSON?
2108 S. ELWOOD AND M. WILSON

Simultaneously, at lesson plan level we focus on prompting students toward constant

awareness that the skills they are learning and the consequences of various analytical or
software choices are products of an expansive knowledge and information industry. As
students become practitioners making choices about geospatial software, they must
understand that more is at stake than just functionality or immediately apparent ‘costs’.
Two softwares may seem interchangeable because they can handle similar data or offer
similar geovisualization and web publishing options, but have very different terms of
use, such as allowing the provider to access users’ online activity, personal contacts, or
the data collected. We include activities that intentionally bring students to these kinds
of questions. At introductory level, we invite students to use an app like Strava to
manage or record their biking, running, or walking activities, and also have them
research the myriad ways Strava sells these data to municipalities, which in turn use
these data to redesign urban spatial practices (bike lanes, pedestrian safety, traffic
management). As part of comparing two mapping platforms, we might ask students
to read and evaluate the user agreements around data collection and publication, or
seek answers to questions about ‘fair use’ of data or base maps. In these ways, students
are learning critical GIS praxis through reflexive use of geospatial technologies, learning
that these technologies do not come from nowhere, that we are consumables impli-
cated in particular cycles of value, and that as data producers, we ourselves are value-
producing subjects for these companies.
As a second area of intervention, we also design course syllabi to integrate critical GIS
pedagogies across the full arc of course topics and activities, positioning critical GIS as
an approach that students actively practice throughout a course. We resist the com-
partmentalization of questions around ethics, social implications, history and philoso-
phy, and political potential of GIS and mapping, instead keeping always in view the
pervasiveness of mapping and geospatial technologies in everyday life. Constantly
connecting students to these questions helps contextualize the more technical aspects
of their training, placing these more technical activities within the urgency of the ‘real
world’. To do so, our courses frequently marry the learning of technical operations to
topics within a critical GIS framework, to both build increasingly sophisticated techni-
ques and increasingly complex social and political applications of GI. For instance, we
might have students employ spatial queries to understand the urban geographies of
landlordism, use buffers and spatial networks to understand the implications of food
insecurity, or use spatial analysis of land use and land cover change to understand urban
redevelopment. We design these activities so that students are always also examining
the political and social implications of technical operations in GIScience as we teach
those operations.
Further, our courses grapple with the changing relevance of cartographic principles
and ever-expanding modes of geovisualization. Our syllabi now incorporate carto-
graphic principles throughout an introductory GIScience course, rather than as a lead-
in to GIScience content. We teach a wider range of theorization around the social and
political salience of geovisual artifacts, designing courses such that students can under-
stand how animation and interactivity work as ‘visual variables’ for cartographic repre-
sentation (Roth 2013) and how maps work as forms of social engagement through
which interpretations and meanings are produced and circulated.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SCIENCE 2109

These course activities promote technical learning that situates geospatial technolo-
gies in everyday life (for some). The pervasiveness of web-based map media has forced
new articulation of the diverse ways in which students perform spatial analysis. The
emergence of platforms that emphasize maps as rhetorical devices (such as Esri Story
Maps and interactive webmaps in the New York Times) and platforms that allow students
to analyze and interpret materials in the spatial digital humanities have expanded the
range of what can be considered ‘analysis’. In this context, we suggest that spatial
analysis is never only ever about the techniques available within ArcToolbox. As geo-
technologies increasingly function as spatial media (Crampton 2009, Leszczynski 2015),
‘analysis’ now also includes curation of spatial meanings through a mix of representa-
tional forms and practices, inviting questions around the irresolvability of the crisis of
representation, and ways that value is created by the geospatial industry.
We contend that designing syllabi to support critical GIS pedagogies means creating
opportunities for a ‘tacking back and forth between technical practice and critical
practice … between using digital spatial technologies in radical ways and relentlessly
situating those same technological practices’ (Wilson 2015b, p. 31). Students need to
understand a little about the history and implications of the tools. These histories
become more vivid when they start to see the enduring traces of decisions made as
early as the 1960s around the way these tools work. For instance, we historicize spatial
data formats, from shapefiles to KML files to GeoJSONs, and discuss how these formats
represent different corporate and open source approaches to geospatial data/software.
Technical standards and protocols leave a residue, changing the practices and cultures
of interaction with GIS and mapping.
As a third area of intervention, our critical GIS pedagogies involve efforts to provide
students not with a singular pathway through GIScience, but multiple paths. We work
with our critical human geography colleagues to imagine how courses in critical map-
ping and GIS might enhance the specific learning objectives of their courses in eco-
nomic, feminist, urban, or political geographies. For instance, Elwood’s GIS Workshop
collaborates with nonprofit groups engaged in anti-poverty work. The course includes
relational poverty theory and analysis (Elwood et al. 2016) and co-enrolls GIS-focused
geography majors with those focused on interdisciplinary critical poverty studies. We
partner with colleagues in fields such as design and planning, agriculture and the
applied natural sciences, or fine arts, to imagine how mapmaking capacities, and the
critical aptitudes for understanding the implications of maps and GIS, might expand
cross-disciplinary inquiry and creative expression across. For instance, Wilson has sup-
ported the creation of alternative offerings of an Intro to GIS course tailored to environ-
mental studies and natural sciences students. Of course, the contingencies of GIScience
education mean that the pathways we create will shift students’ aptitudes and skill sets.
Without abandoning the demonstrated success of GIScience education that has enabled
students to move directly into the geospatial industry and other applied careers, we
must also imagine emerging sectors (web design, nonprofit technology support, data
analysts, activists, data journalists, social workers) that bring different motivations, pas-
sions, and frameworks/philosophies around geospatial technology and cartographic
representation.
This vision of multiple pathways through GIScience – a vision that is complementary
with the GIS & T BoK – involves courses where the prerequisites are not necessarily only
2110 S. ELWOOD AND M. WILSON

about previous technical experiences. For instance, the community projects in our GIS
Workshop and Mapshop engage organizations working for social and economic justice.
For us, this means that prerequisite knowledge includes an understanding of structural
processes of impoverishment (racialization, bordering, gendering, and other processes
of social differentiation) through theory and/or through lived experience. The team-
based projects in our Workshop/Mapshop courses set up a collaborative learning
environment in which students need not all have precisely the same entering technical
or social/spatial theoretical qualifications, but can and will learn from one another.
Critical GIS pedagogies involve making room for curricular pathways in which students
qualify for advanced classes not only through their experiences with the ‘ArcToolbox’
but also through human geography learning, lived experiences, capacity for care, and
curiosity to understand. Doing so may also impact the bodying of our courses, disrupt-
ing the disproportionately white male demographic in many GIS classes. In our experi-
ence, building GIS courses that explicitly prioritize a diversity of experiences and
expertise builds enrollment by female students and students of color.7
To move beyond ‘Week 10: Ethics’ with pedagogical thinking in critical GIS is to
recognize the various contingencies for GIScience education in specific departments,
their histories and mythologies around the teaching of mapping and GIS, and specific
faculty and their diverse interests and affinities. We resist efforts to distill a singular
model for the development of geospatial skills. Instead, we offer that the critical
aptitudes and capacities for thought that we call ‘critical GIS’ are formed and trans-
formed through course activities and lesson plans, syllabi designs that foster technopo-
sitional learning styles of doing and studying, and curricular pathways that are always
shifting.

5. Conclusions: ours and our students’

With institutions of higher education increasingly focused on student evaluations, post-
graduate outcomes and other measures of ‘value’ and quality (Roberts 2000, Loftus
2006), the question of how students respond to critical GIS pedagogies is consequential.
Here, we turn to student responses to our critical GIS interventions and the larger
lessons for critical GIS teaching and learning that arise from teaching in these ways.
The excerpts from student evaluations included here are illustrative of the range of
responses we typically receive: some students welcome these practices and others resist
them. Our discussion draws from analysis of all available comments on student evalua-
tions of courses we taught in the GIScience and cartography curricula at five geography
departments from 2003 to 2016. The courses include general education digital geogra-
phies/digital mapping, principles of GIS/cartography, and GIS Workshop courses for
senior undergraduates. We engage these student comments as evidence of the rework-
ing of what it means to do GIS that our pedagogies are designed to foster.
Some students respond with negative comments that try to delimit ‘GIS’ around
particular software or skill sets they think the job market demands. In an introductory
class where students worked with five spatial data creation and online mapping plat-
forms in just 10 weeks, one student wrote, ‘Make assignments that are more GIS related’.
Given the breadth of environments the student had actually worked in, we read this
comment as resistance that pushes for a singular understanding of ‘GIS’ as a specific
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SCIENCE 2111

software package (probably Esri products), against our ‘learning to learn’ approach that
exposes students to multiple platforms and environments. Of the same course, another
student wrote: ‘The assignments are too easy, and they don’t really help students to
have skills built up for [a] career’. We understand this second response as signaling a
disjuncture between a narrow techno-centric, instrumental approach to GIS praxis that
some students think is necessary for professional opportunities and the broader range of
aptitudes and orientations we feel are imperative for their future success. These pres-
sures have long been present in GIScience education, but seem magnified in our
universities after the US Great Recession, where tuition rates, student debt, and employ-
ment anxieties have skyrocketed. Evidencing this valorization of technical learning over
all other learning, one student wrote, ‘This course had a great mix of lecture and lab
time. I think the labs should weigh more in the grading scale however because it is
important to remember how to use the software’. These comments all respond to critical
GIS pedagogies by trying to get us to match our approach to the students’ preexisting
ideas of what the learning of GIS is and should be. Students recognize that we are doing
something different than they expected and some try to get our approach to GIS back in
the box.
Other students welcome disruption of their preconceptions. One student wrote,
‘My preconceived notion of what the class would be was upended. Instead of just
creating or discussing digital maps, we covered digital aspects of our society’.
Another wrote, ‘This course was a breath of fresh air from the smothering barrage
of Esri modules that are the centerpiece of most previous GIS courses I’d taken. Like
learning a language, the best way, in my opinion, to increase GIS fluency is by being
immersed in it … not just by doing exercises with predetermined results’. These
wide-ranging responses chart a central challenge for critical GIS educators: we must
consider both what we want our students learn and what preconceptions or expecta-
tions must be disrupted and rewritten in order for this to become possible. This
informs our argument for infusion of critical GIS throughout entire courses and
curricula. The pervasive presence of critical GIS-inspired questions, approaches, and
reflections normalizes them as central to GIScience, whereas a ‘Week 10ʹ approach
further inscribes them as ‘other’.
We see evidence in our course evaluations that some students understand the
technopositionality we are trying to inculcate – both doing GIS and studying the effects
and implications of GIS operations. Asked what aspect of the class contributed most to
their learning, some students point to both specific techniques and the critical capacities
of these technologies, thereby demonstrating the crystallization of this way of thinking
and doing GIS. One student wrote: ‘I really enjoyed how it was a technology class that
still incorporated social justice. It felt like it was a programming class for people’. For this
student, it was notable that a course they presumed would be focused on technology
instruction also incorporated perspectives common in the critical social sciences.
Students have long appreciated the applied traditions furthered by GIScience and
many GIScience curricula incorporate capstone courses where students can break free
of recipe forms of technical instruction. Like us, they recognize the learning value, ‘I like
using GIS outside of a step by step text. Make[s] for a better learning experience’.
Pedagogies for critical GIS amplify these moments for the application of technical
knowledge, by bringing different perspectives that motivate these applications. When
2112 S. ELWOOD AND M. WILSON

students write that they ‘Loved the development of technological skills with the social
science perspectives’, we know we have created a particular pathway that perhaps they
had not yet imagined in their college career.
Just as critical GIS pedagogies push students to orient themselves and their learning
in different ways, the interventions described here have also transformed us as educa-
tors. We have had to become more comfortable (or perhaps just more immediately
aware) of teaching from a position of partial knowledge, helping students learn with and
about interfaces or techniques that are also very new to us. We have become more open
to failed experiments in our own class/lab activities and in students’ project work. We
have abandoned the idea that we should teach by demonstrating techniques over
which we have full mastery, or that students can only do ‘real world’ projects when
they themselves have full mastery over these techniques. This said, it is crucial to
recognize that exploratory creative pedagogies carry different risks and opportunities
for different instructors. Critical GIS teaching and learning is a project of collaborative
and modest knowing. Yet, what is possible within these orientations is structured
through race, gender, age, faculty position, career stage, departmental position, and
intellectual identities. As faculty who are usually identified with critical GIS (not
‘GIScience’ writ large), our technical qualifications are routinely questioned by students
and other instructors. In spite of having similar technical skill sets, Elwood routinely
receives lower ‘knowledge of subject matter’ evaluation scores than Wilson, underscor-
ing that technology expertise is still more readily ascribed to bodies read as male than
female.8 With universities increasingly focused on assessing and measuring faculty value,
these dynamics are consequential and can be magnified by student resistance to
pedagogies that push them outside of what they think they should be learning. Our
own pedagogical experiments are protected in significant ways by tenure, white privi-
lege, and appointments in departments understood by university leadership to be
thriving. Pre-tenure faculty, faculty of color, and those working in precarious depart-
ments or contingent faculty positions need active allyship from administrators and
colleagues as they pursue experimentation in GIScience instruction.
In sum, we call for a critical GIS praxis that is more than a series of issues, histories,
and concepts that students must memorize and rehearse. Pedagogies for the teaching
of critical GIS require that we unsettle the technology, its techniques and practices, its
cultures of interaction, and its presumed social implications. Critical GIS pedagogies
require multiple levels of intervention, from the lesson plan to the syllabus to curricular
pathways. These developments are always contingent and specific to the faculty and
departments that foster (and resist) them. These moments of teaching and learning
always combine the social and the technical; just as the technologies and their ecosys-
tems change, so must our perspectives and approaches around teaching them.
Pedagogical thinking around the teaching of critical GIS insists that we need students
who can make and use geospatial technologies and not just commentate on them. We
urge a technopositionality that is responsive to the urgencies of our planet and respon-
sible to the generated effects, whether expected or unexpected, of engaging spatial
data and technologies. With these dynamics in mind, we emphasize that all faculty in
departments that teach GIScience courses have a potential role to play in making space
for critical GIS pedagogies, not just those who teach these courses. The space granted
for GIS instruction has long been a narrow one – with imagined revenue streams
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SCIENCE 2113

celebrated by some faculty as ways to fund a healthy department existing alongside

entrenched skepticism and condescension around what a GIScientist thinks and does.
The best models for the teaching of GIScience in alternative ways require an entire
faculty to creatively situate the instruction of geospatial technology within existing
curricular pathways while also imagining new combinations of courses (perhaps team-
taught, interdisciplinary, in partnership) that push into unexplored arenas of knowledge
and inquiry.

Notes
1. All evaluations examined were anonymous. No identifying information (other than depart-
ment, course number, and year/term) is recorded in student evaluations.
2. A few undergraduate texts adopt critical orientations to GIScience and mapping: Schuurman
(2004), Crampton (2010), Krygier and Wood (2016).
3. There are undoubtedly many shifts we overlook from our current vantage points in the
academy, at large research universities.
4. Digital spatial humanities is building epistemological breadth in GIScience by expanding
the ways of knowing that can be practiced within digital spatial environments, and has
prompted advances in spatial cyber infrastructures that expand the range of computa-
tional ontologies that are possible (Goodchild 2012, Sieber et al. 2014). Socially engaged
teaching with GIS receives ever growing attention as campus administrators recognize how
GIS and mapping can be used showcase the ways their universities are meeting land grant
and public missions.
5. As one reviewer points out, the uptake of GIS across disciplines means that curriculum level
critical GIS interventions must move beyond only geography departments toward cross-
campus collaborations.
6. ‘Special Topics’ is an all-purpose course title commonly used in our departments for the first
offering of a new or experimental course.
7. We do not have student demographic data for the courses considered here, but anecdotally,
we have each observed rising numbers of female students and students of color in our classes
as we have implemented and deepened the strategies described here.
8. Much research on higher education indicates student evaluation bias against women in male-
dominated fields and against faculty of color in all fields (e.g. Huston 2005, MacNell et al.
2015).

Acknowledgments
Our pedagogies are deeply intertwined with colleagues and community partners from across
our careers; we owe a debt to a number of people who have both inspired our creativity and
given us the space to innovate: (in alpha order) Luke Bergmann, Meghan Cope, Jeremy
Crampton, Laura Greenfield, Nandhini Gulasingam, John Paul Jones III, Vicky Lawson, Pat
McHaffie, Tim Nyerges, Sue Roberts, Nadine Schuurman, Emma Slager, Tanya Torp, Kevin
Turcotte, Matt Zook.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
2114 S. ELWOOD AND M. WILSON

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