Spatial Literacy and the Postgraduate GIS Curriculum

The practice of GIScience is fundamentally spatial, yet many taught postgraduate students training in GIScience do not have a formal academic background that has developed their spatial thinking. This paper conceptualizes the process by which spatial literacy develops through spatial thinking as a function of spatial abilities, strategies and knowledge, and outlines a framework for spatial thinking that can be mapped against a formal curriculum for GIS such as the Body of Knowledge. In the future, this mapping activity will allow the scaffolding of both subject knowledge and the building of spatial thinking skills together in a more explicit way than has been previously considered.