ABSTRACT

A number of years ago, eight to be exact, I started a monthly column in what was then Mapping Awareness (MA) and subsequently became Mapping Awareness and GIS in Europe on ‘GIS in School Education’. This was carried on by colleague Mark Chaloner. At that time in the UK, relatively little consideration had been given to the teaching of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in the school curriculum, although a number of papers, presented at special sessions of the annual conference of the Association for Geographic Information (AGI), had discussed various different aspects of introducing GIS into school education and the school curriculum, as well as higher education: for example, the AGI Conference and Exhibition of 1991 and 1992 (Cassettari, 1991; Clark, 1991; Freeman, 1991; Green and McEwen, 1992; Heywood and Petch, 1991; Kemp, 1991; Langford and Strachan, 1991). The AGI Yearbook (1991) saw the inclusion of some chapters on GIS in Education (Green and McEwen, 1991; Unwin and Dale, 1991). Freeman (1993) produced an AGI monograph entitled ‘GIS in Schools’. The 1992/93 and 1994 AGI Sourcebooks also included a number of papers on GIS in higher and secondary education (Forer, 1994; Gittings et al., 1993; Green, 1993, 1994; Green and McEwen, 1994; Maguire, 1993; Masser and Toppen, 1994; Palladino, 1993a, 1993b, 1994a, 1994b; Petch et al., 1994; Raper, 1993; Smith, 1994; Vicars, 1993; Wheatley, 1994; Wood and Cassettari, 1993).