The Kick-off meeting of the SPACIT project, Comenius Multilateral, was held in Germany, the 21st and 22nd of January 2012 at the Geography department of the University of Landau. The consortium is composed of 12 partners from Austria, Belgium, Germany, Turkey, Italy, UK, and Romania and 2 non European partners from USA and Japan. The partnership include universities, associations, NGOs and schools and is led by the Centre for Geoinformatics (Z_GIS), an interdisciplinary centre established at Paris Lodron University Salzburg.
SPACIT seeks to examine the concept of Education for Spatial Citizenship, a new research field. Early theoretical and empirical work by the project team suggests that geo-media (geographic media) sets the stage for the appropriation of space by contextualizing communication. Geo-media is any media that uses the spatial localization of information. It includes all representations of space, covering a wide range of outputs, from verbal description to visualization, mass media and Web 2.0.
SPACIT can be considered an ongoing way of learning and teaching, which aim is the critical appropriation of the space through a democratic way. Its final aim is to give students a concrete tool to consciously get possession of the universe from the physical and socio-political point of view.
SPACIT aims at giving an appropriate training to teachers in order to promote an active spatial citizenship in the POF of the schools in the following ways: provide an up-to-date online text on the geoinformation (GI) society; provide a competence model and curriculum that promote a further participation in the geoinformation society (spatial citizenship); production of materials to learn/teach actively all of the spatial citizenship skills and competences to pupils through 4 units of training. These are i) basic concepts of spatialities, ii) spatial thinking to understand and make use of the absolute concept of space, iii) GI-enabled spatial citizenship and spatial communication – to be able to translate between social and absolute space and make use of spatial representations in everyday lives, and iv) GI-enabled Spatial citizenship – participation – to be able to effectively use spatial representations in collective decision making processes.
The publication of free online materials will help the circulation among the teacher training institutions that are beyond the project consortium, and it will also be supported by publications in both national and international journals specialized in teacher training.
SPACIT is a great opportunity to extend the citizenship education towards themes that young people are more interested in and improve the general consent about it; it is through citizenship education and its role that young people can acquire information and be active citizens in society.
The website of the project will be available soon. For further information please send an email to the National Coordinator at email maja.brkusanin@cesie.org
Partners:
EUROGEO (Belgium)
University of Jena (Germany)
European youth parliament (GB)
CESIE Palermo (Italy)
University of Koblenz-Landau (Germany)
University of Tokyo (Japan)
NCGE (USA)
+ 3 partner schools
