Teaching with and through Maps

Classroom Activities

Map Analysis

Before students begin reading Frankenstein, the jigsaw group focused on exploration conducts their research and presents their findings to the class. This gives all students a basic familiarity with the history of Arctic exploration, so they are ready to examine and compare the three historical Arctic maps. Before students do their own analysis, they review a brief excerpt from the first section of Lobeck’s Things maps don't tell us; an adventure into map interpretation. Lobeck presents two maps of the Pacific Ocean region, one from 1589 and one from the 1950s, and walks readers through the important differences such as the sizes and shapes of different landmasses and the positions relative to latitude and longitude.⁴⁸ It could be helpful here for the teacher to use Lobeck’s maps and observations as a model for inference-making, as explained in the Teaching Strategies section. For example, I might say, The 1589 map says New Guinea is almost as big as the United States, but on the 1950s map it is much smaller. I say that places become better known as they are explored. And so, New Guinea was probably not well explored in 1589. Students examine the maps by Moll, Carey, and Stanford in small groups and record their observations and inferences. Then, groups share their inferences with the class. This gives the teacher time to add information that students missed or correct misconceptions.

Mood-O-Meter

Rather than introducing the concept of mood with a boring slides presentation, I capitalize on adolescents’ love of self-exploration and personality quizzes. The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts has an online game called the Turner’s Apothecary Mood-O-Meter with the tagline: “Prescribing art to suit your mood.”⁴⁹ Users answer a series of questions, and at the end the Mood-O-Meter gives them and a “diagnosis” of their current mood and a “prescription” of a J.M.W. Turner painting. For example, I took the quiz today and was prescribed Sea Piece with Figures because apparently I’m feeling choleric, which the Mood-O-Meter defines as “excitable, active, and a bit cranky.” Students take the Mood-O-Meter individually, and then volunteers share their results with the class. We engage in a whole class discussion, reviewing the artworks and talking about what aspects of the pieces create mood. The Mood-O-Meter gives students a wider vocabulary to discuss mood, and the discussion gets students in the habit of inferring mood based on their observations. Students complete this activity after reading the first three chapters of Frankenstein so they are ready to discuss mood for the first time in chapter 4. At this point, the jigsaw group that researched Romanticism would share what they learned with the class so we can discuss Shelley’s and Turner’s works as examples of that genre. 

Mood Mapping

As students continue reading Frankenstein, they engage in different strategies of mapping the mood in visual, tactile, and auditory ways. I introduce and model each strategy and let students experiment with using them to map out the mood for selected passages of the text. For the audiophiles in my classes, listening to excerpts from an audiobook and then creating a soundscape or soundtrack for the excerpt is an easy entry point. Listening to a skillful audiobook narrator performing a text adds nuance and emotion that students might not get by reading off the page. After listening, students select sound effects and songs to represent the passage and discuss the reasons for their choices and what text evidence supports their reasoning.

For the more visually-oriented students, using art techniques inspired by Tom Phillips’s A Humument⁵⁰ is another way to bridge the gap between observation and interpretation. Phillips took a copy of a cheaply-purchased Victorian novel and transformed it page by page using painting, cutting, and collage. Some of the most “map-like” images can be found on pages 9-10, 51, 90-91, and 127. In these images, Phillips uses untreated space to create a “route” for the eye to travel from one word or set of letters to the next, and the words and visual elements complements each other to contribute to mood. My students were introduced to erasure poetry in sixth grade, so this activity is a natural extension. Given a photocopied passage from Frankenstein, students select words, phrases, or groups of letters to include in their final piece and decide what to obscure. Passages from volume 1 chapter 4 and volume 2 chapter 2 would be good candidates for this activity. Students also add visual elements like color or pattern to the image. As with the music activity, students discuss the reasons for their artistic choices and what their final image expresses about the original text.

As a third option, students use ERT to label the emotions they feel while reading a passage on a diagram of the body. They refer to the Wheel of Emotions or Feeling Wheel⁵¹ to narrow down to the most precise language they can and discuss what text evidence contributes toward the feelings they have identified. All three of these emotion mapping activities prepare students to write an accordion paragraph analyzing how Shelley creates mood in a specific passage.

Map Creation

At the conclusion of the unit, students write an accordion paragraph analyzing how Victor Frankenstein and his monster develop, interact, advance the plot, or develop one of the novel’s themes. To prepare for this assessment, students create maps to gather their ideas and evidence. The type of map that students create depends on their choice of topic, with all options taking inspiration from Berry and McNeilly’s Map Art Lab. Following the creation and peer-review of their map, students write an accordion paragraph focused on their chosen element: character interactions, or the development of plot, theme, or character.

Character Development: Road to Destruction

For students writing about how the characters develop, the “Road to Success”⁵² map would be the best choice, although it might better be termed a “Road to Destruction” map in this case. In this mapping activity, students choose a character and visualize his journey to destruction, using symbols to represent key moments along the way. Each symbol should represent a piece of text evidence that shows how Victor’s or the monster’s personality led to his tragic end.

Character Interactions: Map of You & Me

Students who are tracing the interactions between Victor and the monster use a “Map of You & Me.”⁵³ This type of map visually represents the relationship between two individuals through the use of symbols standing for significant moments of connection or disconnection between them. Each symbol should depict a piece of text evidence that shows how Victor and the monster interact, and how those interactions change over the course of the novel.

Plot Advancement: Journaling One-Liner

The “Journaling One-Liner”⁵⁴ style of map is best for students who are writing about how the characters advance the plot, as this type of map is similar to a traditional plotline diagram. This method of mapping tells the story of a journey using one line. Symbolic details and different line styles visualize parts of the journey, or in this case, text evidence indicating plot stages. Because Frankenstein is three plots in one (the monster’s tale told to Victor, Victor’s tale told to Walton, and Walton’s tale told through letters to his sister), I would have students choose one character’s journey or subplot to focus on.

Theme Development: Detours

The last map type, which works best for students who are writing about how the characters develop the theme, is the “Detours” map.⁵⁵ In this mapping style, students choose a theme and depict how it develops, including obstacles or delays. The symbols on this map represent text evidence that shows how Victor’s or the monster’s actions develop one of the novel’s themes.