Promoting Civic Engagement Competence through Emotional Geography-Based Spatial Story Making in Community Participation Projects

AbstractThis study examined whether an emotional geography-based community participation project enhanced students' civic engagement competence. The participants identified community problems based on emotional geographies, created their own spatial stories using spatial analysis and emotional mapping, and finally proposed spatial development strategies. A civic engagement competence questionnaire and reflective journals were used to examine the project's pedagogical effects. The results showed that civic engagement competence scores increased statistically significantly after the activities. The themes extracted via thematic analysis included the cultivation and manifestation of civic engagement competence, as well as emotional geography activities for civic engagement competence in educational contexts.Keywords: Emotional geographiesemotional mappingcivic engagement competencecommunity participationspatial story Notes1 Research had reported different constructs of civic engagement. However, the focus of this study was not to evaluate which model is better than another but to examine whether the emotional geography project is beneficial for enhancing civic engagement competence. Thus, a validated civic engagement construct was adopted.2 The judgement of practical significance using Cohen's d should be performed according to the research context (Thompson Citation2006). However, if sufficient related research does not exist, the following rule of thumb can be applied (Huck Citation2008): 0.20 (small), 0.50 (medium), and 0.80 (large).Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2021S1A5A8065063).Notes on contributorsMinsung KimMinsung Kim is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography Education at Seoul National University. His research focuses on spatial thinking, geospatial technologies in education, geography curriculum, and teacher expertise.