Learning and Teaching with Maps

Patrick Wiegand

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134383849
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

A comprehensive and authoritative account of how primary school children and teachers can use maps to enhance learning and deepen understanding of this essential skill. It includes all aspects of map use, such as reading and interpreting maps and using maps to find the way, covering maps of all scales, including globes and atlases. The text is extensively illustrated with examples, including maps made by children themselves using conventional materials as well as computer software.

A particular feature of the book is the integration of digital and conventional mapping, and Internet and CD-ROM cartography together with simple applications of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) appropriate to the needs of children right through primary and secondary education.

This book will be of great use to all primary teachers and subject teachers in secondary school as well as non-specialist geography teachers, and will enable children to use all types of maps in new, compelling and thoughtful ways.

1
Introduction

Maps have never been so popular. The use of internet mapping sites for locating places and planning routes is expanding rapidly alongside growing sales of conventional paper maps and atlases. Maps are increasingly used for business, pleasure, advertising and art and the expanding availability of mapping software is democratising map making so that anyone can now make a professional-looking map with relative ease. Even books about maps have become best sellers, telling tales of geological jealousy and cartographic crime (Harvey, 2000; Winchester, 2001). Cartography and geo-information science is now a major sector in the information economy. Ordnance Survey data, for example, are estimated to underpin £100 billion of British economic activity annually (Lawrence, 2003). The number of people now using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) worldwide is more than 2 million and growing at 20 per cent per year. Locational technology has pervaded most aspects of everyday life so that few serious leisure time aviators, boaters, motorists and walkers are unaware of the benefits of Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers for satellite navigation.

In addition to their popularity, maps have never been so relevant to education. As a distinctive form of communication, ‘graphicacy’ has been viewed for many years as a fundamental skill: the ‘fourth ace in the pack’ along with articulacy, literacy and numeracy and meriting its inclusion in the curriculum from an early age (Balchin and Coleman, 1973). Free or low cost supply of hard copy maps and digital data to schools from national mapping agencies has increased the availability of teaching materials and raised student motivation. There is evidence too that map based activities are spreading to other parts of the curriculum. For example, computer mapping tools are used more in science than in geography in the United States and they increasingly feature in relation to education about eGovernment and citizenship. Much digital mapping involving young people is community focused. However, the importance of maps to education is not just driven by technological development. The irresistible romantic myth of pirates’ treasure maps remains as popular as ever with children. Maps have the propensity for fantasy, taking us to faraway places with strange sounding names. They offer an escape to the imaginary geographies of children’s literature: the Hundred Acre Wood; Narnia; Earthsea; Middle Earth and Oz.

We might expect, therefore, that map education for children and young people would be a vibrant enterprise. But the picture is patchy. Teaching and learning with maps takes place primarily in the context of geography at school and I know of no country in the world where geography education is increasing its curriculum share. In the UK at least, discourse in geography education has steadily, over a lengthy period, drifted away from maps as a key pedagogical issue. Whereas Boardman (1974), for example, found that the principal objectives quoted by geography teachers for undertaking fieldwork were to enhance students’ map skills (such as orientating a map, following a route and relating landforms to contour patterns), replication of his research 25 years later (Smith, 1999) demonstrated that the significance of map skills in fieldwork had declined markedly. Attempts to reconfigure geography for the twenty-first century curriculum market have not positioned maps as a high profile element of the brand. Mapping in schools has not kept pace with developments in cartography, most of which have been computer based. Three quarters of the Ordnance Survey’s revenue, for example, now comes from the sale of digital data and only one quarter from paper maps (Lawrence, 2003). Some years ago, Gerber noted that ‘much of the mapping skills work in schools relies heavily on cartographic thinking that is at least twenty years old’ (1992:201). Progress since then has, at best, been slow. Most important of all, map related pedagogy is poorly developed. The evidence for children and young people’s learning with maps is fragmented and there are few comprehensive accounts written specifically for teachers. Many teachers, even geography teachers, regard maps (and especially small scale maps) as being unproblematic for learners.

Research in cartography and children

‘Maps and children’ as an area of research interest represents, in one sense, a subset of the much larger enterprise of spatial cognition and cognitive mapping, which deals with how we come to understand spatial relations via direct experience of the environment as well as through external representations such as maps. Much research on children’s spatial cognition has focused on their mental representations of spatial relationships and many investigations involving children and maps have not been driven by an interest in cartography at all (Liben and Downs, 1989). Instead, maps have more often been used as a means of accessing some other focus of interest such as children’s knowledge of their local environment. There are also numerous studies of children’s spatial thinking which refer not to maps in the sense in which most people would understand the term but to aerial photographs or hardware models, whilst new cartographic media such as 3D computer-generated representations of terrain and photo-maps have been almost completely neglected. What this book attempts to do is explore children’s engagement with ‘real’ (i.e. cartographic) maps: how they read and interpret them, use them in the real world and make their own.

On the whole, research evidence in relation to young people’s thinking with maps is stronger for preschool and primary age children than it is for secondary school students. Evidence is also stronger for children’s thinking with large scale plans of small spaces (such as a room or playground) than it is for their thinking with small scale maps and atlases. We have almost no longitudinal studies providing evidence for the development of individual children’s ability to access cartographic information or the progression in learning made by a cohort. Above all, we know very little about school students’ engagement with higher order thinking in cartography and geo-information science. The contribution computer mapping can make to education is often promoted with missionary zeal but we are short of hard evidence about what students actually learn. Problem solving, making inferences and decision making (especially with interactive mapping tools) is under researched as is young people’s use of maps to learn ‘subject’ knowledge such as geography, science or history. In most map related research the map itself (although frequently omitted from the research report) is a given. There are few examples of children having to select the most appropriate map for a specified purpose.

This book aims to make a contribution to the development of map and geo-information science pedagogy in school as well as to the field of educational cartography by identifying and bringing together research evidence for children’s thinking with maps, much of which has hitherto only been available to readers with access to academic or professional journals. It attempts to explore the nature of map skills, to understand children’s cognitive development in relation to these skills and to suggest implications for the school curriculum and strategies for classroom practice in order to promote more effective learning and teaching with maps. It also tries to identify good practice in the making of maps for children and young people.

Chapter 2 introduces a profound change that has taken place in recent years in the way we access information from maps. It clarifies some key terminology that will be used throughout the book and explains how conventional and digital maps ‘work’. Chapter 3 examines several broad theoretical perspectives which have underpinned accounts of children’s thinking and gives examples of how these perspectives have shaped our understanding about children’s learning with maps. Chapter 4 deals with evidence for children’s thinking with models, aerial photographs and large scale plans of small, familiar areas such as rooms, buildings and their immediate surroundings. How children use maps to navigate their way successfully around spaces such as these is explored in Chapter 5 and examples are provided in Chapter 6 of the strategies children use when making their own maps of the neighbourhood. Children’s thinking with small scale maps (i.e. maps of countries, continents and the whole world) as well as atlases is described in Chapters 7 and 8. Chapter 9 offers broad structural guidance on planning a cartographic curriculum in school and draws attention to the nature of individual learner differences in relation to maps, particularly gender and special educational need. The following three chapters (10, 11 and 12) provide specific examples of appropriate map related activities for each of three target age ranges (i.e. the lower primary, upper primary and lower secondary years of schooling). These activities are especially designed to be readily applicable to teachers in a variety of educational contexts. A curriculum that included all these suggestions would be very full indeed and leave little room for other subjects but the listing is intended to stimulate curriculum development, not to prescribe a definitive curriculum plan. Some of the activities described are currently widely undertaken, others hardly at all. Some used to be taught but have now fallen out of favour. There are considerable resource implications for materials (e.g. of maps, hardware and software), the availability of which will influence what can be achieved and in some cases health and safety issues are raised (such as in more adventurous wayfinding with maps involving off-site visits). Chapter 13 suggests some ways in which teachers and others can make better maps for children. The final chapter summarises some key points and looks to an agenda for change.

Although the book has been written from a UK perspective, an international readership is anticipated and therefore references to specific cartographic products and curricula have been minimised. I have generally preferred the word ‘legend’ rather than ‘key’ in the text as this is the term most commonly used by cartographers.

Whether you are a parent, teacher, student, cartographer or (like so many people) just interested in maps, I hope you will take from this book an enhanced understanding of how children make meaning with them and what strategies can be used to promote map learning.

Part 1
Understanding maps

2
Cartography and geo-information science

To introduce some of the themes that run throughout this book, we start with two examples (125 years apart) of young cartographers at work.

Plate 1 shows a world map drawn by a young woman at the Leeds Ladies College, Yorkshire, in 1880. It has been painstakingly copied from an atlas into a notebook at a size of about 11cm×16cm. Although the watercolour has faded, the pink wash of the British Empire is still just visible, its extent emphasised by use of a Mercator projection, which enlarges land areas towards the poles. The map has been fastidiously labelled: land masses and oceans are in sloping capitals; other place names are executed in a tiny, non-cursive script. We don’t know how long it took her to copy this map. Ten hours? Perhaps more. The task’s function as a learning activity was, presumably, straightforward: simply to show where places are in relation to each other. As the notebook is hard-backed and quarter bound in leather, we can assume it was intended to last for many years: an authoritative and unchanging inventory of the world.

By contrast, Plate 2 shows a series of screen shots from a group project carried out by school students in Yorkshire in 2005. They are investigating a proposal that the village of Hebden in the Yorkshire Dales National Park should be designated a Conservation Area. This involves them carrying out an environmental appraisal of the village and assessing the extent to which individual buildings exert a positive or negative impact on the village’s character. The students’ target is to make a presentation arguing a case for, or against, creating a Conservation Area and (if making a case in favour) delimiting its proposed boundary. The information they collect is stored in a database and mapped with Ordnance Survey digital data using ArcView (ESRI, see Appendix). They have collected and mapped data on the age of buildings (Plate 2a; oldest buildings in red; most recent in green) and linked digital images to individual properties. This helps them visualise the historic structure of the village. They notice that building materials are important in determining the character of the built environment (Plate 2b shows roof material: slate in grey; stone in yellow) and mapping the physical attributes of buildings helps the group identify those which contribute most to the character of the village and those which contribute less. To think about the proposed Conservation Area boundary they add an aerial photograph and contours to the view (Plate 2c), which helps them consider the village in its topographic context.

In both instances, the students are using maps as tools for learning but they are also learning about the process of mapping. In the nineteenth century example, country colour is differentiated according to attribute (e.g. membership of the British Empire) and lettering is differentiated by type of feature. Today’s students, however, are empowered to use the mapping environment interactively to find answers to their questions. The maps they make are tailored to their specific needs: they are not reproducing knowledge but creating it. Their ability to select content as well as symbology (they are in control of what to show as well as how to show it) enables them to argue a case. In their hands the interactive mapping environment becomes a powerful tool for persuasion as well as analysis.

These two examples both make use of maps (‘symbolised representations of a geographical reality’, ICA, 2003) but they serve to illustrate profound ways in which cartography (‘the art, science, and technology of making and using maps’, ICA, 2003) is changing.

The ‘cartographic revolution’

Until recent decades, most people experienced maps as printed on paper, objects that could be seen, handled and were (more or less) permanent. Very rapid progress in computing technology has led to increasing numbers of maps being virtual (e.g. existing in digital format and seen only on a computer screen), invisible (e.g. stored as digital data on disk) and even intangible (e.g. accessible over a network from a database) (Moellering, 1980). Traditi...