St Mary’s Hosts Erasmus+ Kick Off Meeting

The Institute of Education at St Mary’s University, Twickenham recently hosted a launch event for the Innovative Pedagogies for Teaching with Geoinformation (GI-Pedagogy) Project.

Guests at the launch came from countries across Europe, including Belgium, Spain, Romania, Austria and the UK. The aim of the three-year EU Research Project, funded by the British Council, is to build on past work done on the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in secondary schools, with a specific focus on Pedagogy and Teacher Training for Early Career and Trainee Teachers.

The meeting provided the opportunity for Partners to meet and plan out what needs to be done, to support and equip teachers to bring GIS into the classroom in innovative and effective ways, by reviewing existing approaches and developing new ways of incorporating web-based mapping software into the Geography Curriculum.

The GI-Pedagogy project will produce a toolkit of resources for teaching with GIS in the most effective way. This will be refined through continuous feedback between teacher training and research institutions, frontline educators and professional geographers. Surveys will also be used to monitor experiences of participating teachers at our two partner schools as well as other associate institutions.  

This EU and British Council grant, worth €350,000, is a part of a highly competitive funding scheme which has been awarded to St Mary’s as the Lead Institution. The grant will allow the project to develop resources to support teachers, which will be freely available on the project website and disseminated via in-person training events to be held across Europe.

Speaking of the project and launch, St Mary’s Project Leader and Senior Lecturer Sophie Wilson said, “We were delighted to welcome our partners to St Mary’s to celebrate the launch of this fantastic project, which will deliver recourses for teachers across Europe and ultimately enhanced outcomes for geography pupils.”