Maps and Mapmaking

Overview

Maps are the Hook

There is no better way to motivate students than to bring the classroom to life with hands-on projects that use examples of real life circumstances. This method also cultivates student empathy and an appreciation for controversy. Young people have a natural affinity for seeking ways to improve themselves and the human condition.

I teach a senior United State Government and Economics seminar on local and global poverty with a particular focus on the developing world. My classes read The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time1 by Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, founder of the Earth Institute. Combining words with maps, Sachs looks at poverty with new eyes and presents achievable strategies for ending poverty.

A questionnaire I recently gave 100 students, revealed the following pattern: 1) students like hands-on projects 2) students enjoy maps and feel they are relevant 3) students appreciated placing their own poverty in context and related to the book The End of Poverty. Students uniformly did not like textbooks and lengthy lectures. They like guest speakers who spoke from 'personal' experience. Overall, students seemed to learn most readily when able to associate information to their own lives and cultural setting.

Using maps seems an ideal strategy to reach my students, most of whom are visually oriented. I intend to use maps to ground discussions and impart information from various disciplines. Students will learn to make maps using compasses and measuring devices. They will map simple angles and spaces. They make maps using their own symbols for economic and social factors in their environment. They will interpret the maps they make to one another in narrative form. The maps will help them in presenting the concepts they have learned.

Using maps and the way they have changed over time as a kind of artistic template will assist students in grasping the origins of today's borders—not only political but psychological.

Maps, like consciousness itself, are expandable. I will use them to teach geography, history, government, land, labor and capital, and income distribution. This will allow me to introduce terms in a dynamic way. Using maps and the way they have changed over time as a kind of artistic template will assist students in grasping the origins of today's borders—not only political but psychological.

Ending Poverty is the Challenge

Maps are not perfectly accurate; they have a point of view. Mark Monmonier states, "Anyone interested in public-policy analysis, marketing, social science, or disease control needs to know how maps based on census data can yield useful information as well as flagrant distortions." ²

All maps reflect data and a perspective on data. Sachs perspective on the possibilities of ending poverty is practical and inspiring. He uses the metaphor of a 'ladder of economic development' to identify degrees of poverty. Sachs focuses on ending poverty among billion people considered the extreme poor and an additional 1.5 billion people who are not on even on the economic ladder of development have no incomes, and are at risk of disease, death and starvation. ³ Sachs cites statistical information in Map 1⁴ which depicts "Moderate and Extreme Poverty," based on World Bank estimates of per capita income in 2004. According to Sachs' data, about one billion people located, for the most part, in Africa are on the first rung on the economic ladder of development and make approximately $1-2 per day. Further along on the economic ladder of development are the 2.5 billion people⁵ of the middle-income world making $9-11,000 per year. On the highest rung of the ladder are one billion people, who live in the upper income cities or countries such as Mexico City, Shanghai, New York etc. However, these statistical "catch-alls" do not show the rich living alongside the poor, or pockets of extreme poverty alongside the middle class. They do not tell the complete story of how income averaging understates both extreme poverty and extreme wealth.

Sachs' theorizes an end to extreme poverty based on a Marshall Plan-style effort to help the poor reach the first rung of the 'economic ladder of development.' He has enlisted the help of rock-singer Bono, Bill and Melinda Gates, politicians such as Bill Clinton, and stimulated a grass-roots movement on college campuses. Recently, President Bush seems to have fallen in line with one of Sachs' suggestions to provide Africa with more resources to fight AIDS. Sachs cites the United Nations Millennium Development Goals as economically viable means of reducing extreme poverty.

Sachs offers a detailed account of several countries' march to economic development. Bolivia, Kenya, India, Russia, China and Poland are highlighted in geographic detail using maps, economic indicators, charts, the description of political decision-making, and first-hand individual accounts. This is not the typical economic textbook!

In order to understand poverty, we examine how land use, disease, and economic development are interrelated. Students will fill in blank maps of at least two countries in Africa: Malawi and Kenya. They will know the basic topography, crops, cities, major roads, and water use. Each student completes a statistical grid, for the two countries, which compares per capita incomes, type of government, population size, GDP, persons living with AIDS, girls going to high school.

Students will be able to locate Millennium Development Villages in Africa which have employed community health measures, education, safe water development, micro-enterprise initiatives and agricultural incentives to boost income, reduce sickness and offer the possibility of education to Africans. Students can read how the possibility of a $10 bed net can interrupt the malaria cycle, reduce sickness and joblessness, and increase productivity. They learn the positive effects of providing free primary school and free lunch to children. For my students, the study of developing countries in Africa is a powerful entrée to their own state of New Mexico.

Santa Fe Has Poor Residents

I would like each student to learn to orient his/herself in Santa Fe, to know and understand the city's basic economic and geographical make-up, and map this world -its geography, history, economy, and social systems. Students will also be able to see what is not represented on maps, how data is graphically displayed, averaged, and interpreted.

I would like to expose students to the most sophisticated levels of geographic, cultural and historical literacy. I want them to have a working understanding of factors involved in the creation of economic growth, resource development, and demographics.

New Mexico is much like a developing country. It didn't achieve statehood until 1912, is landlocked, lacks industry, and has an elevated high school dropout rate. It ranks third in the United States in percentage of persons below the poverty line. Santa Fe's housing market is too costly for most teachers, let alone unskilled laborers. Cerrillos Road, a kind of long strip mall, is the hub for many of the Capital High students and their after school jobs. Capital High's environment is an economic 'world apart' from the Plaza and the north side of town where multimillionaires live.

Forty percent of my students are from Mexico and lived with unemployment, poor water, education, and sanitation. They have come to the United States because they see the opportunities in Santa Fe, with its tourism and service industries and free public education system. They want to learn English. When asked why they came to Santa Fe, many reply that it is because of its high minimum wage ($9.50).

Another 40 % of my students are native New Mexican with roots in the community. About 60% of these students drop out, do not go to college, and have low expectations for moving up the "ladder of economic development."