Scoping Geographic Information Systems for Education: Making Sense of Academic and Practitioner Perspectives

Geographic information systems (GIS) education now takes place in most of the world's colleges and universities, where it involves dozens of disciplines, thousands of instructors, and tens of thousands of students annually. Still, no consensus exists about the scope and content of the field that GIS educators should help students understand. Twenty‐five years of inconclusive debate among academic geographers and GIS practitioners are reviewed from a US perspective, culminating in a pivotal lawsuit in US federal court. A broad and inclusive conception called geographic information science and technology (GIS&T) is proposed to help students make sense of the field. GIS&T is an intersection of accredited and non‐accredited disciplines, regulated and unregulated professions, and old and new technologies. The interests of organizations and individual practitioners are at once competing and complementary. One common interest is, or should be, the ‘body of knowledge’ that distinguishes the field from others and defines relationships among its constituent communities of practice. Continuous development of the GIS&T Body of Knowledge is recommended as a vehicle for communication and cooperation among the diverse interests that make up the GIS&T field.