Education and Geography in Malawi
In “The Role of Place, Geography, and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in Educational Research,” Mann and Saultz (2019) call on educators to respond to the urgent need for educational research that is elevated through the inclusion of the oft-ignored geographic component of education. This call is echoed in powerful ways by other scholars in the 2020 AERA Open publication, which provides theoretical orientations for using GIS in education, methodological examples, and a diverse array of real-world implications.
The applications of GIS and new GIS methodologies such as qualitative and mixed-methods GIS in education are seemingly limitless. Recent research combining education research and new GIS methodologies has been used to explore residential segregation in metro St. Louis school districts (Hogrebe & Tate, 2019). Green, Sanchez, & Castro (2019) use hot spot spatial analysis to trace patterns in Detroit public school closures and new charter school openings. GIS has also been used to understand enrollment patterns in universal pre-kindergarten and patterns of new racial segregation practices in a spatial analysis of southern school district successions (Shapiro, Martin, Weiland, Unterman, 2019; Taylor, Frankenberg, & Siegel-Hawley, 2019). The collective voices of these GIS educational researchers indicate that the once daunting technological and financial barriers to entry for education researchers are no longer the impediments they once were and that the time for incorporating spatial analysis in educational decision-making is now.
GIS is a tool—it can be used to control, disempower, and disenfranchise a people. Still, it can also accurately display and triage the locations of high-risk populations when those who wield it avoid the trappings of power and quick “technofixes for development” (Dunn, Atkins, & Townsend, 1997). Whether in Charlotte, NC, or Lilongwe, Malawi, for those who are willing, GIS can prove to be a useful resource to direct future policy, highlight structural inequalities, and bring to light social-spatial phenomena for the sake of justice.