Interconnected & Multidisciplinary Learning
I am certified to teach General Science, Social Studies, and Agriculture. This means in Pennsylvania I am eligible (if not qualified) to teach history, geography, civics and government, economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, American and world cultures, international relations, agriculture, environmental science, life science, earth science. What this means from a practical perspective, is that students in my classroom can learn just how interconnected all these subjects in this big crazy world are. My few grade group colleagues and I can attempt to deepen and broaden our offerings across and between siloed subjects. It also means I can offer students credit for various subjects within the same classroom space, and even many of the same lessons, depending on which performance tasks they opt to complete and submit within a given unit.
All of agriculture, food and natural resources touch on geography and place-based explorations. Food systems must be explored through considerations of locale, from where food grows and is processed, transported to the concept of food sheds and food miles. The natural resources of air and water are deeply connected to geology and geography. Cities, like Philadelphia, were built along and between rivers for a reason. Our water quality is related to the current park system, which was preserved as a riparian buffer. Soil health is connected to the built environment, industrial zoning, and the accretion and deposition of either organic matter or heavy metals.
Choices made, funded, or avoided by past inhabitants of the land we now call Philadelphia impact our current quality of life, and our options for changemaking. This could be considered political science or history. All of these topics can be explored by using maps, and all of them can happen in our AFNR classroom.
A school colleague and I joined forces last year on a project called 2892 Miles to Go. 2892 Miles to Go is an Explorer Program supported by the National Geographic Society with a mission to enact narrative change and place-based education programs within classrooms and communities led by community leaders themselves.7 Our funding from this project was to allow a multi-disciplinary multi-year program for our AFNR (Agriculture, Food & Natural Resources CTE) students to have opportunities to directly connect food, agriculture and natural resources issues to place. And then to explore and share their stories.
Through this project we have been granted full access accounts to Esri ArcGis. GIS is a powerful set of digital tools that allows students to learn how to take a variety of existing base maps and choose overlays, to visualize data and other information. There are interactive maps, 3D maps, a dynamic and constantly updated collection of maps, data layers, imagery and analytics included in the resources available to us.
I have now been using the Esri Story Map platform to make and share content and have created numerous lessons for students to gain experience using these digital data collections, mapping and presentation tools.
So, while my AFNR students did jump in to learn from the Esri Story Map platform, most used the story map tool to create a presentation that could have been done on google slides, rather than engaging with the platform as map making or map analysis tool. That said, our first 2892 Miles to Go collection, every student story connected personal experiences and wicked real-world questions, to tangible places they knew of, could visit, and could share with others through maps.
We offered students a paid stipend to complete a collection of Esri training modules and get ArcGis certification. Even with these incentives, and robust in person and on-line training we had limited buy in on a more comprehensive use of these digital mapping tools. The lesson that had students most engaged included a paper map of the school neighborhood, which we used for our first walk-audit. Students in teams marked locations and annotated this map, took photos and wrote notes. This walk was not completely phone free, as students did use phones for photography, but each group engaged in lively collaborative conversation about what to record, and every group completed detailed work. This experience reminded me that students value analog options and is encouraging me to focus in this unit on hands-on, analog experiences. I had been asking students to learn how to use sophisticated tools before they could discern the differences between base maps, explain scale, topography, or interpret the quality of data they were blithely layering on top of various locations.
It became clear that a more comprehensive guide to learning, practicing and presenting with maps would help prepare students for this place-based storytelling that we are committed to continuing.
This upcoming year we will expand a partnership with 2892 Miles to Go and the Philadelphia Writing Project’s Re(writing) Philadelphia Histories Project, now also in its second year. Both efforts align at a historic moment — as Philadelphia prepares to mark the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. This alignment offers an opportunity to create space to re-examine, reframe, and re-center many under-explored layers of history that define our city and our nation. It also provides an opportunity to re-examine and reframe how we might engage students in the possibilities of what maps might offer in a structured exploration of the Philadelphia landscape - figuratively and literally.
Our proposed plan with the 2892 Project in the upcoming school year is to integrate Indigenous histories, exploring how Lenape, Black, and Afro-Latino communities navigated displacement, resilience, environmental practices, and foodways—bridging social studies, history, science, and agriculture in deeply interdisciplinary ways, and to mark the 250th anniversary of our nation with our vision for a just, equitable and sustainable future.
In the simplest terms, I hope to leave students with the knowledge and skills to be able demonstrate that the issues they care about, and the stories they have to share, are place-based, and can be understood, influenced, and communicated about with maps. To do so properly, based on my experience last year, I need an extensive introduction to maps, and hands-on opportunities to engage with and build foundational geographic literacy. Students need to develop a sense of scale, orientation, and spatial relationships before we ask them to work with digital tools that assume those understandings.
They need time to explore different kinds of maps—topographic, historic, political, street, thematic—and to understand what kinds of questions each can help answer. They need to wrestle with questions like: What makes a good base map for my purpose? What kind of data is useful, and what just adds noise? These are questions they can only ask, and meaningfully answer once they’ve built fluency through direct, tangible practice.
Comments: