Teaching with and through Maps

Background and Rationale

Demographics

I teach at P.S. duPont Middle School, a public school serving students in grades 6-8 in Wilmington, Delaware’s Brandywine School District. As of September 2024, there were 730 students enrolled in the school. The majority of students identify as Black (49.04%), with 25.89% identifying as white, 7.26% identifying as Asian, 10.27% identifying as Hispanic/Latino, and 7.26% identifying as multiracial. We are a Title I school, and 30.17% of our students are considered low income. Our school is unique compared to the other middle schools in the district because it houses the district’s middle school gifted program, and about 30% of students receive gifted services. 22.19% of students receive special education services, and there is some overlap between the two groups.²

Although I teach both seventh- and eighth-grade Gifted English/Language Arts classes, I am designing this unit with eighth-grade in mind. For the 2025-2026 school year, I will teach 81 eighth-graders. 43 are identified as male; 38 are identified as female. Their racial demographics somewhat represent the district, but do not mirror the building’s demographics. Of my eighth-grade students, about 10% identify as Black, 64% identify as white, and 26% identify as Asian. They receive gifted services in self-contained classrooms for their core classes because they demonstrate above average academic ability, creativity, and task commitment, but they are not a monolith. Some of my students exhibit neurodiversity, managing ADHD, anxiety, and/or autism in addition to their giftedness. In fact, three of my students have 504 Plans and two have Individualized Education Plans (IEPs). They have varied cultural backgrounds and interests, but all are capable of working at or above grade level standards for English Language Arts. With this in mind, the unit is geared toward the standards for the 9-10 grade band rather than eighth grade.

My group of students this year includes talented visual artists, musicians, and athletes, many of whom I also taught in seventh grade. Knowing their strengths and learning preferences, I have designed this unit to include visual, auditory, and tactile experiences. As sixth- and seventh-graders, my students read texts representing perspectives and moments from history including Chinese immigration, the Holocaust, and the Space Race. However, they have had little exposure in ELA class to narratives about exploration and colonization. This unit aims to address that gap through examination of historical maps and their context. 

Mapping as a Pedagogical Tool

The question, “What is a map?” is surprisingly difficult to answer. Clearly, a paper showing the locations of places in space is a map, but this unit considers maps more broadly to include other types of visual representations of relationships beyond physical geography.

There is a research basis to support the use of concept mapping in instruction. Harris and Zha define concept mapping as visually representing the organization of complex ideas. One of their studies found that concept mapping boosted students’ critical thinking about concepts with complex relationships. They found that concept mapping was most effective in preparation for a specific task. In the study, students performed better when they created the maps right before being tested on the content, as opposed to right after a lecture.³ This confirms that concept mapping is worthwhile in preparation for an assessment. In the context of my ELA class, concept mapping immediately before a writing task is most logical. 

Although Harris and Zha found no significant differences in performance among students who created different types of concept maps, earlier research did. Wang and Dwyer describe three key parts of concept maps: concepts, propositions, and structure. In their study, they gave participants a workshop on concept mapping and then divided them into four groups: group one did not make concept maps to study the text they were given to read; group two was given the propositions and had to fill in the concepts; group three was given the concepts and had to fill in the propositions, and group four created their own concept maps, with no structure given. The researchers found that group two had the greatest mastery over the material. They performed better on tests of factual recall and conceptual understanding.⁴ This finding indicates that providing the propositions (relationships) and structure to students and having students add the concepts (characters) is the best way to visualize relationships among characters.

In addition to organizing complex ideas, maps can make abstract concepts visible. Middle school students often struggle with literary terms like mood and tone, which require them to name and describe intangible feelings. Boutelier describes how a process called Emotional Response to Text (ERT) assists children in developing social and emotional competency alongside academic skills. Using ERT, the teacher guides students in situating their emotional responses in the body. For older students, Boutelier recommends students find text evidence to support the emotions they experience, use a wheel of emotions to identify more precise words for feelings, and contrast emotional responses across multiple texts.⁵ These strategies are precisely what my students need in order to craft analyses of mood in literature.