Designing online workshops for teacher trainees : heritage mapping with web GIS story maps

In a context of online and blended-learning education, widely applied during the COVID-19 pandemic and retained afterwards, geography education found great support in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Already long before the pandemic, GIS were one of the most used research tools by geographers. Since a few years, educative curricula have increasingly started to include GIS. However, people without a background in geography such as future teachers may struggle to manage these technologies, both technically and in terms of the required spatial reasoning. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the design characteristics of online workshops with teacher trainees that should allow to deal with these struggles. The workshops used web GIS story maps and focused on local and foreign urban heritage in Madrid and Krakow, cities that both host a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The teacher trainees had to create digital didactic routes to allow primary school pupils to become familiar with urban heritage processes. Fulfilling this task required the development of digital and didactic competencies, geographical reasoning, and critical thinking on familiar and unfamiliar urban heritage. In the Anthropocene epoch, accurate teaching projects like these workshops are needed to raise the spatial awareness of people, above all basic education teachers, who contribute to the making of future digital and global citizens. In conclusion, this paper could become a good-practice workshop design aimed at teacher trainees who at present show a lack of geographical and digital knowledge but will have to teach about this knowledge in the future