Teaching Geography in Times of COVID-19: Experiential-Based Learning with Everyday Digital Tools

SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) has adversely impacted many geography programs across the globe. An essential component of many geography programs is fieldwork, and many scholars point out that the discipline of geography gravitates toward fieldwork activities and experiential-based learning methods (Healey and Jenkins 2000; Ives-Dewey 2009, Mathews and Flynn 2018). Unfortunately, since December 2019, fieldwork-based exercises have been postponed or cancelled across the US due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Many geography programs have been forced to migrate their classroom-based courses from face-toface interaction to online courses while simultaneously postponing fieldwork, field excursions, and conferences to adhere to physical distancing protocols. Keeping in mind that many people learn while doing, experiential-based learning curricula provide significant benefits to students (Roehling et al. 2010; Fulford 2013). These benefits are derived from in-person or remote courses through digital tools. Knowing that spatial thinking can be fostered in both curricula and by using technology (Kerski 2008), this paper focuses on an experiential-based teaching and learning lesson plan incorporating the everyday digital tools of smartphones, spreadsheets, and ArcGIS Online. Instructors can direct students to individually work in the field or their surrounding environments by using these standard technologies while maintaining physical distance during the pandemic. This lesson plan is designed to provide both junior high and high school students at home with a comparable fieldwork and technology experience (i.e., identifying a question to answer, data collection, and cartographic representation) to that which may be encountered in a face-to-face traditional GIS instructional laboratory. While students in a classroom may have access to various instruments to take physical measurements of the environment (i.e., wind speed or sound intensity instruments, GIS software such as ArcGIS Pro), these resources are often almost always absent for students engaging in distance learning from home. This lesson plan offers teachers and students the alternative of using their smartphone to collect data and ArcGIS Online to summarize and visualize their fieldwork through maps. This experiential-learning lesson plan was modified for high school and junior high students during the California State University, Stanislaus’s Science Saturday service-learning activities in Fall 2019. These exercises evolved from the introductory course, Introduction to Geospatial Applications. Equally important, this exercise is transferable to an online instructional setting, much like what many instructors are currently experiencing due to the pandemic. Lessons that focus on the use of handheld GPS receivers (i.e., Trimble, Garmin, Magellan) depend on the availability of the product. An advantage of this lesson plan is that students are freed from the requirement of owning a handheld GPS receiver and instead take advantage of everyday tools. This flexible lesson plan allows students to (1) learn the principles of GIS, (2) learn about and utilize smartphone-integrated GPS receivers and applications (here, I present just one of multiple possibilities), (3) learn about use of spreadsheets (i.e., Excel or Google) to integrate data collected into ArcGIS Online to map, and (4) analyze the results.