Educational and sustainable heritage routes: Madrid & Krakow

The project HERIGEOCARTO (SF21D4) was funded by the Una Europa 2021 DIGITALIZED! Seed Funding Initiatives, involving the cities of Madrid and Krakow, both hosting a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The main goal was to design and implement a workhop for trainee teachers in each city to create storymaps of critical and sustainable heritage routes for late Primary Education students.

The storymaps results are also involved in a 2022/2023 Teaching Innovative Project ("Proyecto de Innovación Docente) from UNED (the largest distance learning university in Spain): "El digital story map como recurso para la sostenibilización del curriculum" ["The digital story map as a resource for the sustainability of the curriculum"]. This teaching project is part of a wider European Project: "Virtual Field Work in the context of Global Change – a blended learning approach for higher education (V-Global)” (2021-1-FR01-KA220-HED-000023242). Erasmus+. KA2 KA220-HED - Cooperation partnerships in higher education.

1. Task: To develop a didactic pedestrian route using online cartography. The route should have a maximum length of 5 hours and deal with the heritage in the cities of Madrid and Krakow. The target audience is pupils of about 12 years old.
2. Goal: To use online digital cartography in order to develop geographic competences and acquire urban critical heritage knowledge, as it is required in the new educational curricula.
3. Resources: StoryMaps tool from ArcGIS Online, which is the most powerful webGIS and which is freely available.
4. Participants: Teachers in training. Around 10 students per workshop. Individual work.
5. Timing: Online classes of 2h for 5 days (Total: 10h).
6. Sequence: Introduction + Pretest + Theoretical class about urban critical heritage + Practical class about webGIS + Production of the routes + Posttest [+ Evaluation of the routes].
7. Data collection: pre and post workshop questionnaires for students and an evaluation rubric for researchers/teachers.
8. Evaluation: longitudinal study of acquired learning from the student point of view and a teaching assessment of the level of digital, geographic, heritage and sustainability competences which have been developed.

Fulfilling this task required the development of digital and didactic competencies, geographical reasoning, and critical thinking on familiar and unfamiliar urban heritage. We found that students reported clear improvements in geographical reasoning skills, regarding both GIS and heritage interpretation. There were no clear patterns regarding the role of familiarity with the studied city for the quality of the produced storymaps.

In the Anthropocene epoch, accurate teaching projects like these workshops are needed to raise the spatial and sustainability awareness of people, above all basic education teachers, who contribute to the making of future digital and global citizens.

On final reflection, our study gives tentative indications that using web GIS for virtual field trips in familiar and unfamiliar urban environments can be particularly useful also in post-pandemic times, now that online or hybrid educational formats have mainstreamed. This can even bring broader benefits in terms of sustainability (economic savings and reduction of the carbon footprint when complementing fieldwork offsite) and widening participation agendas (by training citizens in online expression skills which support a more universal access to democratic participation). Dealing with digital divides is crucial in this respect, though. Nevertheless, online cartographic exercises may be a valuable addition to the geographers’ educational toolkit to bounce forward to a more resilient, sustainable, open, and reflective educational practice after the pandemic. So, this workshop could become a good practice aimed at teacher trainees who at present show a lack of geographical and digital knowledge but will have to teach about this knowledge in the future, under a sustainability framework.

The workshops were implemented and analysed in 2022. There are two scientifc articles, where the learning (1) and design (2) results can be found. They are published in high-impact journals, indexed as Q2-JCR (1) and Q1-SJR (2).

1. Martínez-Hernández, C., Stoffelen, A., & Piskorski, R. (2022). Obtaining geographical competences through online cartography of familiar and unfamiliar urban heritage: lessons from student workshops. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, Published online. https://doi.org./10.1080/03098265.2022.2155935
2. Martínez-Hernández, C., Piskorski, R., & Stoffelen, A. (2023). Designing Online Workshops for Teacher Trainees: Heritage Mapping With Web GIS Story Maps. European Journal of Geography, 14(3), 68-78. https://doi.org/10.48088/ejg.c.mar.14.3.068.078