Chapter 10: Learning to Do Geospatial Data Visualization in Science Classrooms

This chapter examines geospatial data visualization, not as a technology, but as a set of practices that are taught and learned in classrooms. All of the chapters in this volume share an interest in the relationship between visual data artifacts and the people who learn to make sense of them. For researchers, it can be convenient to focus on one-to-one interactions between a person and a data artifact, as one might do in a think-aloud interview of a person manipulating a data map. Our focus here is on classroom contexts in which these person-visualization interactions take place and the complex support systems that surround learners as they interact with visual data. To better understand how people learn to do data visualization, researchers need to develop a contextualized understanding of that learning process as it occurs in everyday environments.