Student participation in real-world problems promotes "a sense of their own agency andcollective capacity to alter their neighbourhoods or communities for the better" (Smith, 2007).This paper describes student engagement in a two-week summer workshop conducted in June2016, where they used geospatial technologies and community mapping to investigate questionsrelated to the school neighborhood, located in a large urban city in the Midwest United States.Using critical pedagogy of place (Gruenewald, 2008) as our framework, workshop contentfocused both on the sources of inequality and injustice related to four student inquiry topics(community assets and needs, parks and community gardens, crime, and housing), as well assupported ways students could generate solutions to the problems they investigated. Analysis ofdata collected through interviews, sketch maps, and a transformative experience questionnaire(TEQ) suggests students' perceptions of the neighborhood and their ability to effect change waspositively impacted, contributing to a sense of civic identity.