To content
Department of Spatial Planning

Contribution to a workshop on GIScience education at the GIScience conference in Leeds

Photo of René Westerholt and Simon Scheider at GIScience 2023 in Leeds, UK © Thomas van Dijk​/​Ruhr University Bochum

GIScience is taught in a variety of contexts. There are only few stand-alone GIScience degree programmes and so it is the rule rather than the exception that GIScience concepts are taught within the framework of other disciplines. René Westerholt discussed this nexus in a presentation for the GI Education Workshop (led by Michael Gould, Justine Blanford, and others) held in conjunction with this year's International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2023) in Leeds, UK. After briefly taking stock of some of the bigger curricular initiatives from the past 30 years, and informed by a brief discussion of key arguments and findings regarding teaching GIScience ‘elsewhere’, the presentation stimulated discussion on the multifaceted and multidisciplinary nexus in which many GIScientists are embedded. The talk included short reflections on the implications of the multidisciplinary contexts mentioned for the creation of a GIScience identity among students enrolled in other degrees, recruitment of PhD students and faculty, higher education policy and funding, and what all this possibly means for how the community sees itselves as GIScientists. This talk was accompanied by a commentary that was published earlier this year in the Journal of Spatial Information Science (see the reference below).

Westerholt, R. (2023): Teaching GIScience in the multidisciplinary nexus. Journal of Spatial Information Science, 26, 129–136. DOI: 10.5311/JOSIS.2023.26.299.