TeachSpatial Blog

Howard Gardner's work on multiple intelligences has been cited as an important reference in

the advancement spatial literacy. Specifically, he identified spatial intelligence as one of the seven (now eight) distinct human intelligences.  The following link comes from the Encyclopaedia of Informal Education, and provides a good synopsis of Gardner's work and it's relation to education practices.

http://www.infed.org/thinkers/gardner.htm

The W. M. Keck Foundation has awarded a three-year, $250,000 grant to the University of Redlands for a project entitled LEarNing Spatially (LENS): Infusing Spatial Thinking into Undergraduate Education.  This funding creates new opportunities for faculty and undergraduate students in multiple disciplines within the College of Arts and Sciences to use maps, mapping, and spatial perspectives in their teaching, learning, and research.  Specifically, this award will support faculty development through fellowships and workshops, student opportunities through internships and collaborative research, and the development of innovative technological applications. 

From the LENS website:

LEarNing Spatially (LENS) is a campus-wide initiative promoting spatial literacy as a foundational component within a liberal arts university. This is the outcome of 10+ years of Redlands' dedication to spatial thinking in curriculum, programs and research. Spatial thinking – the ability to visualize and interpret location, distance, direction, relationships, movement and change through space – is at the core of our work. Our initiative represents a lead effort in understanding how geospatial technologies can be linked to the greater pedagogic objectives of critical thinking and problem-based learning. We are not just teaching a tool, but a way of thinking. Our approach develops student and faculty capacity to explore the spatial nature of multiple disciplines in order to generate insights that drive active learning. LENS harnesses the integrative power of geography with technologies to help faculty and students visualize knowledge, solve problems, and understand relationships through a spatial lens.

In December, 2008 a specialist workshop titled Spatial Concepts in GIS and Design was hosted by the University of California, Santa Barbara Center for Spatial Studies (also known as spatial@ucsb). One of the core questions discussed was 'to what extent are the fundamental spatial concepts that lie behind GIS relevant in design?' One approach to answering that is to identify the sets of fundamental spatial concepts that lie behind each field—GIS and 'design'—and find their intersection. We undertook the first step of that procedure last year, and the preliminary results appear in the Concepts section of the teachspatial.org web site. The field of design in this inquiry is limited to urban design and architecture, with concepts drawn from Kevin Lynch's classic of design theory, Good City Form and Christopher Alexander's The Nature of Order.

"...spatial thinking is pervasive: it is vital across a wide range of domains of practical and scientific knowledge, yet it is underrecognized, undervalued, underappreciated and underinstructed" — from the 2006 NRC report, Learning to Think Spatially

"...we know that spatial cognition is malleable, and that spatial thinking can be improved by effective technology and education. But as the NRC report points out, we still don't know exactly how to infuse spatial thinking throughout the curriculum..." — N. Newcombe (2006) A Plea for Spatial Literacy

At the University of California, Santa Barbara's Center for Spatial Studies we’ve recently undertaken to develop methods for locating and measuring spatial thinking in text collections, with a few goals in mind. The first is quantifying just how pervasive spatial thinking is, differentially, in many STEM knowledge domains. We expect to demonstrate a breadth that will strengthen the case being made to educators and funding agencies for expanded and more explicit instruction in spatial thinking. The second goal is locating evidence of spatial analytic reasoning in existing published educational standards—or the lack thereof. Finally, we expect that identifying a broad range of highly spatial exemplar research projects will assist in developing educational goals generalized across many disciplines, as well as specific curricula and lesson plans. This work will be detailed in a forthcoming paper, but this blog seems a reasonable venue to share the plan of work and interim results.

GIS Is Enabling Rich Historical Investigations