Teaching with and through Maps

CONTENTS OF CURRICULUM UNIT 25.04.01

  1. Unit Guide
  1. School Background
  2. Pedagogical Philosophy
  3. Background and Content Rationale
  4. Strong Starts in Unit Zero
  5. Hic Sunt Dracones = Here Be Dragons
  6. Why Scale Matters: Borges and 1:1
  7. Scaling Up or Down
  8. Activity: What’s Puzzling about Scale?
  9. The Coordinate Plane is a grid map, right?
  10. Mapping , The Constant of Proportionality
  11. Global Measurements
  12. Sense Making and Assessment
  13. On Cooperative Learning, Routines, and Practices
  14. Appendix on Implementing District Standards
  15. Annotated Bibliography
  16. Notes

The Touchstone Atlas: A portfolio to promote transfer

Raven Dorman

Published September 2025

Tools for this Unit:

Annotated Bibliography

Boutte, Gloria. Educating African American Students: And How Are the Children? New York, NY: Routledge, 2022.

This book provides a framework for culturally relevant pedagogy and offers practical application.

Library of Congress. “Nautical Atlas of the World, Circular World Map of the Portuguese Hemisphere and Title Page.” The Library of Congress, 2015. https://www.loc.gov/item/2021668720/.

This website provides an image of the circular world map that students can use to determine circumference.

Open Data DC. “Open Data DC.” opendata.dc.gov, n.d. https://opendata.dc.gov/.

This website provides DC ARC GIS maps that students can use to analyze map data to determine proportional relationships.

Rankin, Bill . “After the Map.” Afterthemap.info, 2025. http://www.afterthemap.info/images_1.html.

This website provides numerous grid maps for use in creating coordinate plane overlays.

Rankin, Bill. “Radical cartography.” Radicalcartography.net, 2024. http://www.radicalcartography.net/.

This website offers regional maps that show demographic information. The maps showing housing, income, poverty, and crime data can help students think critically about interpreting data.

Stern, Julie, Krista Ferraro, Kayla Duncan, and Trevor Aleo. Learning That Transfers: Designing Curriculum for a Changing World. Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin, 2021

This book is a resource to help teachers plan for learning transfer rather than repetition and mimicry.

Steven Ory. “On Exactitude in Science.” YouTube, December 18, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XowAGpW-QXw.

This video provides read-aloud and visual with captions for the short story On Exactitude in Science by Jorge Luis Borges.

Uwm.edu. “Hispanic America Index to Millionth Map / Amer. Geogr. Soc. N.Y.,” 2025. https://collections.lib.uwm.edu/digital/collection/agdm/id/4829/.

This image can be used as part of the What’s Puzzling about Scale activity.

www.arcgis.com. “Map Viewer,” 2020. https://www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?webmap=30d2e10d4d694b3eb4dc4d2e58dbb5a5.

This website provides ARC GIS map views, allowing students to zoom in and out to create tables, graphs, and equations based on how the constant of proportionality changes in two zoomed views.

Zwiers, J., Dieckmann, J., Rutherford-Quach, S., Daro, V., Skarin, R., Weiss, S., & Malamut, J. (2017). Principles for the Design of Mathematics Curricula: Promoting Language and Content Development. Retrieved from Stanford University, UL/SCALE website:

This article explains the usefulness of math language routines in promoting language acquisition and discourse.

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