The teaching of Geographical Information Technologies oriented to territorial and interactoral work: starting to see the city with different eyes

Abstract

Traditionally, the subjects of the Geography Degree at the University of Buenos Aires, and especially those related to the teaching of Geographic Information Technologies, have included proposals applied to land use planning or environmental evaluation. At present, they have incorporated collaborative work with other institutions and disciplines to address social problems that people who encounter barriers in their mobility face daily, such as people with disabilities and older adults. In this sense, we will share the experiences emanating from a collaborative work project that included three on-site surveys on the state of sidewalks, ramps, and accesses to public establishments in the surroundings of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters and a field work carried out during the pandemic by Geography students coordinated by teachers from the Disability and Accessibility Program, in which members of FundaciónRumbos participate. The students had in the instances of theory classes, an introduction to the social approach to disability and accessibility, then they worked in the preparation of the field work adjusting spreadsheets, value scales, they used global positioning devices (GPS), processed the information in a Geographic Information System (GIS) incorporating categories of territorial analysis and disseminated the obtained results on a web geoportal. The importance of having had the experience of working with other disciplines together with FundaciónRumbos, and of using wheelchairs or being able to observe the movements of blind people using blind canes during field surveys, changed the way chairs’ members and students perceive the space.