Using Maps to Learn About Philadelphia
Through an exploration of contemporary and historical maps of Philadelphia, we will begin to uncover how policies shaped neighborhoods, how infrastructure created divides, how communities organized in response, and how those patterns still shape life today. This grounding in place isn’t just about learning where we are, it’s about sparking curiosity, building research skills, and helping students see that their neighborhood is part of a much larger story, one they are empowered to explore and eventually retell through mapping.
To prepare students for this map-guided trip back over time, we will begin by locating ourselves in geographic Philadelphia. We will start with a deceptively simple assignment to draw (part of) a Philadelphia neighborhood from memory. This cognitive mapping assignment is not meant to be too accurate or to scale, but rather to help students externalize their current sense of place, and expose how personal experience and memory shape their sense of place.
We will then go outside together and in small groups and answer the questions: Where are we? What do we see, hear, smell? Who else is here? What do we wonder? Students will observe and document what they see—street names, landmarks, green spaces, vacant lots, murals, corner stores, and community institutions and annotate printed out maps with our school at the center, that I will provide. We might start to consider. What was here before? Who used to live or work in the building we now call our school? Where does the water go when it goes down the sewer? What is the air quality? And most importantly, when observation is insufficient to answer these questions, what tools can we use to get empirical?
Then we come inside and look together at dozens of maps - from historic, through fantasy and emotion mapping. By exposing students to the creative breadth of examples, I hope they will be open to be expansive in their explorations using and presenting with maps as we go along.
After that I will use 10-15 maps featuring the “shape” of Philadelphia, printed with a pin at a somewhat central address of our school, to familiarize students with how they will encounter many maps of Philadelphia. Often these maps have useful data shared on a colorful blob in a particular shape (the boundaries of Philadelphia) which seems to sit untethered to geographic reference points. There are countless maps that are regularly used to depict issues such as heat island or tree cover or other environmental or social issues, that show a familiar (to me) outline of Philadelphia, data about the specific topic, but are missing anchoring information. Every map doesn’t need rivers, suburban neighbors, or highways, but there does need to be a way for students to understand what and where they are looking at. These maps are often very useful to tell a particular story or highlight an issue, but until one is familiar with the schema of the neighborhoods, and connections to outlying neighborhoods, this information is insufficient, and students are not fully grasping the meaning, and the connection to how this data directly connects to where they live, play and go to school.
Figure 1 Two Maps of Philadelphia, the one on left with no geographic anchors – which is all too common, and confusing to students. To the right the same shape shown with context, but no overlay of data.
After reflecting on how we might orient ourselves on maps with only a few (but not no) clues, we will trace a 3D printed outline of the shape of Philly and create our own maps, adding key features chosen by students.
These extended introductions will include basic map vocabulary, and basic map conventions, alongside a chance to zoom out from our neighborhood to our city, and our wider mid-Atlantic region. For each of the different maps of Philadelphia and the wider world that we use, students will be guided to make observations: What do you notice? What looks familiar? Who is the audience for this map? At the end of this multi-day introduction we will contemplate together a shared definition of a map. Hopefully they will have had enough lessons and activities with maps of Philadelphia for them to recognize where many key features such as the rivers, large parks and key neighborhoods within the now familiar shape of their city.
The next set of activities will build towards how maps are essential for understanding key natural resources. We will explore how maps represent three-dimensional topographic data on a flat map. Each student will create a topographic (2D) map representation of a three-dimensional elevation of their nose. This simple exercise, which requires putting clay over your nose to make a mountain-like shape, slicing this nose mountain at three or four heights, and tracing the outline on paper lined up horizontally, helps students see just how elevation lines on a topographic map represent changes in height and shape turning information about a 3D form into a readable 2D representation. We will then explore, and some students will make, a 3D topographic map of Philadelphia. Others will use a topographic map of our park system to plan hikes of varying degrees of hilliest Philadelphia neighborhood.
Figure 2, My nose, represented 3D and as a topographic sketch
We will take a field trip and hike from the city’s high points in the Northwest, where there are many popular walking trails. Students will use paper trail maps and take pictures of the many “you are here” kiosks which help locate park visitors. We will discuss how the city purchased this land over the last 200 years specifically to protect Philadelphia’s point source water.
The Philadelphia Water Department has invested considerable resources putting useful maps and resources on their website. There is a collection of historic maps showing all the streams and infrastructure to keep those streams flowing and keep our rivers clean. They have many resources to help students understand that “we drink the river,” an entire unit which we will work on later in the school year. We will use an interactive mapping tool to find out what watershed our school is in and identify on our Philadelphia map where hidden (built over) neighborhood streams flow into the larger rivers. We will take some of the elevation maps and spray the models with water and watch the water shed into the river. We will compare choices of scale, color, and size, and be able to trace water from our upstream neighbors to the Atlantic ocean.
Once we are familiar with the outline and basic layout of the city we call home, we begin our map guided tour through the history of Philadelphia. These activities will use a set of maps, curated to spark inquiry into the connections between the natural features of the Philadelphia region, and the many people who have made choices about land use and other issues over millennia. Students will have access to paper and digital map images, primary and secondary source information about the specific map and/or the time period, alongside a set of questions to guide their consideration of environmental, food, social and political issues alongside what we can see of geographic features such as open land, rivers and streams. Their familiarity with the two rivers that center the lives of the native Lenape, and between which the city was first established, will only reinforce the watershed lessons considered earlier in the unit, and later in the year when we study drinking water.
As we travel through time using imagined and authentic historic maps, students will start to use these maps as a resource to get information from, and also be invited to consider the map as a canvas upon which they can add marginalia. Their questions, annotations, reflections and more will be solicited in various ways, with the big invitation to students to curate and collate a collection with a working title “Atlas for the Future” (more information available in teacher resources section) which includes information gleaned from their explorations, and some guided visioning towards what a map of Philadelphia of the future might look like.
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