I remember being a second-year student in my introductory GIS class, one of many who begrudgingly took the course as a graduation requirement and nothing more. I did not know what GIS was until my first year of university, and the thought of committing to learning this entire interface, loosely aligned with my career goals, seemed meaningless. When my teaching assistant introduced our first assignment, my determination to succeed was not tied to conceptual understanding, but rather to maintaining a high GPA. As you can imagine, having authored this blog, I have since become devoted to GIS.

In the fourth year of my Honours Environmental Sciences Co-op degree at McMaster University, I am now a teaching assistant for the introductory GIS course that turned my career path on its head, hoping to inspire my students as I was once inspired. Over my first instructional term, I have acquired several techniques and principles that I believe have improved both my teaching quality and students’ educational outcomes.

The First Class

One of the main barriers to enthusiasm about GIS is a lack of understanding. Very few students in this class have any experience with GIS, Esri, or any platform with a similar interface. So in the first class of the semester, I devoted significant time to conceptual basics. To create a base-level understanding, I compare ArcGIS Pro to a Photoshop interface or the Sims 4. Both of these examples involve interfaces similar in layout to that of ArcGIS Pro and are much more widely understood by students.

The other basic skill requiring development for many students is computer infrastructure systems and file storage. Understanding paths, folders, and file types is essential to success in GIS, and is lacking from most high school curricula. I spent roughly 15 minutes explaining local storage, how to connect student OneDrive accounts on our lab computers for saving work, and how to download data, unzip folders, and add data to different locations on the computer, understanding their different use cases. All of this occurs before ArcGIS Pro is even opened.

While there were still questions about these topics throughout the course, I am confident that my first class boosted understanding and promoted student success.

No One Benefits If I Do It For You

I firmly believe that comprehension stems from confusion. The best way to develop a thorough, conceptual understanding of GIS topics is to be incredibly confused and have to figure it out yourself. As a student in this introductory GIS class, my questions were often returned with guiding questions instead of concrete answers. I remember feeling, at times, frustrated by the ambiguous answers given by my teaching assistant, but I now see the wisdom in this approach and have continued to confuse my students for their own benefit.

I taught in tutorials that were two hours long, once a week, and students had one tutorial with me for each assignment that they needed to submit. Though I was accessible by email for the remainder of the week, the in-person instruction is when the majority of work was completed, naturally generating the most questions from students. I decided that as the tutorial went on, the directness of my answers to questions would increase.

At the beginning of tutorials, I would often prompt students with questions, direct them to lecture content, or ask them to use Google or Esri Help. This gave them time to wrap their own heads around the material to develop a lasting comprehension of it. It also familiarized them with common problem-solving methods in GIS, used by many GIS professionals. Since my time with the students was limited and I did not want a tutorial to end while students were still lost, I would answer more directly as the tutorials went on, so that I was confident they were leaving with the ability and tools to finish the assignments. Closer to the end of class, I may tell them which toolbox to search in for a tool, or explain more in-depth which formula should be used.

I feel that my approach was geared towards long-term success and understanding in GIS, as well as high achievement in assignments.

Why Care?

At the end of the day, I could try as hard as I wished to ensure that students were learning as much as possible in my tutorials, but none of that truly mattered if they didn’t care. If students are not passionate about what they are doing, their level of effort will simply not meet that of those who are invested and interested in the content. For this reason, I wanted to demonstrate the importance of GIS in solving many modern problems, the versatility of the software, and career potentials in this field.

I spoke about my own GIS projects and my experience in different co-op placements to demonstrate the impact of upper-year GIS courses. When students began a new assignment, I would explain how this was similar to real-world situations and how GIS was instrumental in solving these problems. Ideally, these strategies persuaded students to continue with GIS.

Back to the Basics

Although my main goal was to help the students in the class, being a teaching assistant for GIS has improved my own comprehension as well. Teaching is a form of active recall as it involves answering questions about content relevant to my own projects and career, so I have come away from this experience with greater confidence in my own abilities. Being able to instruct others on basic concepts such as projections and simple analysis has strengthened the foundation from which I complete more complex projects, improving my theoretical and practical knowledge.

Conclusion

My first experience teaching GIS was a fantastic one. I was able to build on previous instructional experience as an emergency supply teacher for elementary and secondary classes, and as an undergraduate teaching assistant for human geography and environmental sciences classes. Teaching in my own field was beneficial to me, and hopefully to my students as well! I look forward to further instruction in this field and to helping future GIS professionals meet their full potential.