Teaching with and through Maps

History of Cartography 14

Cartography is the study and practice of making maps.  It is the science and art of creating visual representation of geographic areas.  Students are most familiar with maps in their social studies class when they see a globe or a large map of the United States.  Students also know about the navigation systems in their parents’ car known as The Global Positioning System (GPS.  Someone can input a location on Google Maps and the navigation system will pick up the signals from satellites and calculate their position and guide them to their next destination. Maps today can be hand-drawn or created by technology such as Geographic Information System (GIS), Google My Maps, and Open Street maps.  My students will be exploring these different map resources.

Map reading is the ability to comprehend and learn how to interpret legends. It’s a visual representation to recognize symbols, and learn about the compass rose, scale, and location of places, events, routes, and geographical features.  Maps use a scale indicating the relationship between the distances on the map in correlation to the actual distances on the ground. Spatial awareness is a vital skill for students, not only in geography but also in problem-solving across various subjects. Maps help students develop spatial awareness by improving their ability to visualize information, make connections, and think critically. The four most important things on a map are the title, map key or legend, scale indicator, and compass rose or north arrow. These elements provide essential information for interpreting and understanding the map.

Per William Wagoner, “A Cartography of the Self: Making Meaning of the World through Life Maps,” there are various mapping techniques and they have been developing for many centuries for different agendas including cultural, economic, nationalism, political, and social influences. Maps are valuable tools to support diverse learning modalities.  It can be used in many subjects and there are many types of maps. Any aspect of our lives can be mapped, from what is in our minds, to our hearts, our bodies, our past and future. By slight changes to content and form, a variety of personal geographies can be mapped. ¹⁵

As Jill Berry states in her book Personal Geographies, “You can make a map of nearly any journey, place, day or experience… maps can be intimate and personal, or grand and inclusive. They can be a ritual way to journal your day, or a permanent and elaborate illustration of your life’s journey”.¹⁶

Stephen Hall pointed out in an essay entitled “I, Mercator,” that this mapping of the interior self is much like orienteering (the act of finding one’s way through a wilderness armed only with a compass). As he explains, “Orienteering is such an odd but impressive word that it has always stuck with me, and in fact moves me to propel a related concept to describe a process somewhat like orienteering but more personal, more historical, more associative, more metaphorical, perhaps more spiritual: “orientating,” or crashing through the larger landscapes of memory and experience and knowledge, trying to get a fix on where we are in a multitude of landscapes that together compose the grander scheme of things.” Using an existing map as a reference, plan a basic map in your area you want to map, get out and walk the area. You can add additional figures like the smells you encounter on your journey.  Make a key to describe the features.¹⁷