Conclusion

The professional outlook of a discipline-perceived as the ability to act within a discipline-is continuously created, recreated and in these processes contested and changed. In this development, instruments for doing the profession such as GIS in the field of geography play an important role because they are not neutral agents. GIS are a physical artefact that gradually becomes transparent and a personal instrument for the learner through the process of instrumental genesis. With the personal instrument, the scholarly knowledge (geography) and the knowledge of how to use the artefact (GIS) merges together. The use of GIS in geography will inevitably change the way we as geographers think spatially (in this paper illustrated by the student quote about solving a particular task). As GIS have become more and more widespread in the education of geographers, we, therefore, need to address not only the skills of students as spatial thinkers, but also the learning processes leading students to become spatial thinkers. In a small empirical study of how students learn GIS at the University of Copenhagen, we

have shown that the use of GIS is not neutral and it influences the way students perceive and understand geographical issues. Also we have shown that students have different strategies for creating their personal instrument for spatial thinking when they are learning GIS. Importantly, it was further found that the chosen teaching orchestration with a cookbooklike manual had different effects on the learning strategies of the students in their process of creating personal instruments. Type A students follow the orchestrated teaching and are left with a low chance of creating a strong personal instrument because they follow the cookbook recipe quite meticulously, causing their attention to be constantly refocused to the GIS instrument itself, instead of the result of the geographical analysis performed. Type B and C students, on the other hand, have their own strategies for dealing with the teaching orchestration to develop their personal instrument: type B students stop and reflect during their work with the manual, and type C students play with GIS at home and create their personal instrument outside the teaching environment. These last two types of learning strategies can be interpreted as a case of the students creating their personal instruments and becoming spatial thinkers despite the teaching orchestration. The implications of these findings are threefold. First, in relation to education it is

important to support the students in their process of making GIS transparent and thereby a personal instrument for spatial thinking. To understand these learning processes, we find that the theory of instrumental genesis developed in the field of mathematical educational research can be a valuable research framework. The theory has proven valuable for understanding students’ use of calculators to solve mathematical problems and given rise to discussions of teaching practice within the mathematical community. We find that the theory could contribute equally to a research focus on the learning processes among students when learning GIS and give valuable findings for our geographical teaching practice. Second, from our small empirical study, it seems that the rather ‘traditional’ cookbook

manual used in this course is not the best way to support the learning processes of students in their first meeting with GIS. Often it is argued in favour of the use of a cookbook manual that students must have a basic knowledge of GIS before they can manage to do more project-based work. However, our results show that some students actually learn without the manual using other strategies to comprehend and develop their spatial thinking skills. The students who follow the manual meticulously state that they are almost on autopilot in the learning process and were surprised how little they could remember when we tested