Teaching and Learning GIS in the Time of COVID-19: Lessons from GIS Professors from an Autoethnographic Perspective*

Teaching courses in geographic information science (GIS) requires engagement with software, domain knowledge, information technology infrastructure, and teaching pedagogy, among other areas of practice (DeMers 2016). A robust literature exists and continues to grow concerning how to teach GIS, including the structure and format of courses; which topics or components to include in a course; and what data, platforms, or examples to use while teaching (Kemp, Goodchild, and Dodson [1992], for example). These questions exist across the spectrum of GIS topics and coursework. They are pertinent in the introductory GIS classroom, where learners first encounter formal GIS instruction with a broad background and comfort with the underlying fundamentals of GIS (Bowlick, Bednarz, and Goldberg 2016). These fundamental components—spatial thinking, geographic awareness, computational thinking, and technical expertise (to name a few)—are difficult to standardize or establish a baseline when beginning instruction (Jakab, Ševcík, and Grežo 2017). Teaching GIS remains difficult despite a bvy of introductory textbooks, lab manuals, walkthroughs, and training resources. Pandemic teaching during COVID-19 has further magnified the unsustainable and fraught nature of teaching across schools and universities worldwide (Singer 2020). The remote turn to emergency remote teaching (ERT)—so-called “Zoom University” (Martin et al. 2020)—brings with it immense challenges of access, equity, outreach, and mental health that are impossible to understand and quantify (Heim 2020; Hodges et al. 2020). Distance or online education is a distinct practice and mode of teaching and learning with unique theories, areas of inquiry, and best practices (Moore 1991). However, for decades, online learning has been researched, resulting in well-formed theoretical practices for online instructional design, development, and implementation (Hodges et al. 2020). Since March 2020, however, teaching and learning have crashed into this space due to ERT. ERT is different from online learning in that it is “a temporary shift of instructional delivery to an alternate delivery mode due to crisis circumstances” (Hodges et al. 2020) for a course that would normally be delivered through hybrid or face-to-face classrooms. ERT is not meant to utilize strategies from online learning; rather, ERT requires creative problem solving and quick adaptability. As a result, there is an upending of everyday struggles (but not replacing them); a magnification of existing student issues of access, technology, and equity (but not addressing them); and significant uncertainties and lack of sustainability can fester for whatever comes “after” the pandemic (Lieberman 2021). Instructional demands are not the only demands placed on K–16 teachers during a global pandemic or so-called normal times. The non-teaching components of these positions are still present and pressuring in these environments. Tenure-track faculty, graduate students, research associates, and others are expected to conduct research, much of which has been disrupted by lack of access to lab facilities, human research cessation, travel restrictions, and the general weight of dealing with COVID-19– related disruptions (Myers et al. 2020). Time and access for research have decreased unequally, as researchers’ professional and personal situations disproportionately impact historically marginalized groups of people (Bendixen and Hall 2020). Service and administrative responsibilities have increased as new technologies must be deployed, new strategies for running the dayto-day activities must be devised, and the futures of institutions reimagined (Day et al. 2021). Every piece of education, and the responsibilities of educators, has been struck by COVID-19—in a magnitude unthinkable at the beginning and with impact unknowable looking ahead (Archer-Kuhn et al. 2020). These difficulties converge to create a teaching and learning environment that is difficult to navigate. This article reflects on our ERT experiences specific to teaching Introduction to GIS during an ongoing pandemic. Our courses, facing a constant need to adapt, adjust, flex, and flow, were under significant pressure to support students in extraordinary circumstances while maintaining the necessary content and organization for student success beyond our GIS classrooms. We employ an autoethnographic approach, particularly the Butz and Besio (2009) typological category “Personal Experience Narrative” to reflect and develop insights into our thinking and reactions throughout the challenges of a full ERT semester of COVID-19–impacted GIS instruction, as well as those of our teaching assistants (TAs) and students, during the Fall 2020 semester. With another semester of COVID-19 affecting higher education ahead of us and most