Teaching with and through Maps

INTRODUCTION

While much of my energy, time, and resources go to scaffolding instruction for my disabled students, a large percentage of my high school students are not disabled. Like many abled people, my abled students have absorbed negative stereotypes about what life with a disability is like, and so when they imagine themselves as disabled, they think only of what they would lose.

This fear is especially intense when my high school art students try to imagine life without vision. How would they create art? How would they travel? Their idea of a blind person is someone incapable and dependent, and this idea is based on ignorance of what life is like with disabilities.  Not only does this pity and fear damage their relationship with their disabled peers, as I have had Blind students in my class, these stereotypes give them a fearful mindset about their future: accident, illness, and aging will visit disability of some degree on many, if not most, of us over the course of our lives. 

Stereotypes are based in ignorance, so we must counter that with knowledge. Regardless of ability, all of us are dependent on some kind of mapping for wayfinding, and these systems are the product of design. We already teach design in art class: the color, scale, format and focus of maps are all design choices made by an artist working with science and math. Who can access the final product? Let us expand our teaching of design to include the design philosophy of Universal Design, “the design of environments, buildings, or products so that they can be used by people of all ages, sizes, and abilities” ¹. This philosophy teaches a social and human rights focused model of disability that says disability is part of the human experience and all humans have rights. This can be compared to the deficit model our society teaches, which only focuses on what you lose with disability. ²

I have students with a wide variety of mental, physical, and psychological disabilities mainstreamed in my general education classroom. There is no single perfect training that will equip a teacher to meet the beautiful diversity present in their class. It must be an ongoing process of openness, learning, willing to unlearn biases, and willing to change. Universal Design is a philosophy for teachers to both teach and internalize themselves.

After completing this unit, students should understand how blind people use maps to navigate the world and how everyone uses maps as a representation of their relationship to a place. Students will produce their own tactile maps to this end and incorporate themes of Universal Design. They will understand disability as part of the spectrum of human experience, and their environment as a designed space that can both exclude and include.