Geographic Inquiry and GIS

Geographic inquiry is at the core of Mapping Our World: GIS Lessons for Educators. In this book’s lessons, you will use GIS as a tool kit to explore many issues and, as you use GIS, you will engage in the geographic inquiry process. This section introduces you to geographic inquiry and GIS.

Geography is the study of the world and all that is in it: its peoples, its places, and its environments, and all the connections among them. When you are investigating the physical world and its events, you are dealing with geography. Knowing where something is located, how its location influences its characteristics, and how its location influences relationships with other phenomena are the foundation of geographic thinking. To learn how to think geographically, you can use a process called geographic inquiry. Geographic inquiry asks you to see the world and all that is in it in spatial terms. Like other research methods, it also asks you to explore, analyze, and act upon the things you find.

The geographic inquiry process

The five steps of geographic inquiry are explicitly labeled in part 2 of the module 1 activity. The same steps form the foundation of the other investigations, but they are not labeled. You will naturally integrate geographic inquiry into the process of doing the exercises throughout this book.