Mapping Mapping

PBS’s P.O.V. - Borders

PBS’s interactive web series, P.O.V. - Borders, is a very interesting collection of thoughts on borders, metaphorical and physical. It also contains some great teachers’ resources. 

Diplomacy?

Jason Begy pointed me in the direction of the game Diplomacy for thinking about how to develop an off-line simulation game for negotiating boundaries. Looks like there’s an online version, too. To be explored….

5 themes

Thinking about how all this lines up with the 5 Themes of Geography Approach

Introducing Module 1: Boundaries

Boundaries

“Boundaries” is both an important geographical idea and rich metaphor for thinking about mapping in a participatory culture. Boundaries— whether physical or symbolic— define difference, decide what goes inside and outside. They are necessarily sites of negotiation. How do we decide, represent, and traverse the boundaries personally, globally, and locally?

First Thoughts about Boundaries and our Participatory Modes

We decided to use Boundaries as the mapping theme of our pilot module because we both locked onto right away, linking it to existing ideas and resources. Here’s a taste of what we are thinking about. Please share other ideas as you have them! 

Again we’re still working on what to call these Participatory Modes, but for each, we’re looking for activities and resources to begin to build our pilot:

Civic/Community Engagement - It is clear that “boundaries” is very much tied to how we see our community and how we engage with it. 

Engaging Popular Culture - Anytime we bring popular culture into the classroom, we are faced with senstive material. How do we decide the boundaries of our in-school selves and our out-of-school selves? Whether thinking about the classroom or the internet, are there different level of publicness that we activate according to the norms and values of the setting we’re in?

Representational Plurality - How are boundaries represented on a map? When we draw boundaries, as with the green line art project Nick highlighted in his last post, how big an area does that cover when translated into a real life scale? How do we represent/indicate contested boundaries on a map? Why are some boundaries signified and others ignored?

Simulating Real World Systems- USC Annenberg’s* ReDistricting Game is great online activity for thinking and talking about how constructed boundaries impact the political process. Might we also develop an offline simulation game that addresses similar issues?

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(*Lana’s new home-to-be…)

Modes and Themes, Modules and Models (oh my!)

Modules

After much deliberation, we’ve developed a guiding model for the Teachers’ Strategy. Using the “Themes of Mapping” Nick laid out earlier (Boundaries, Layers, Production/Techniques/Processes, Personal Spaces, Stories/Memories/Narratives) as overarching themes, we will developing modules that address each of the “Modes of Participatory Culture” (Civic/Community Engagement, Engaging Popular Culture, Representational Plurality, Simulating Real World Systems, Re-evaluating the Role of Expertise). Not every mode will be addressed in every module/theme, but we definitely make sure that all are addressed at some point.

Each will contain some combination of:

A Worked Example - profile of an teacher or other youth-serving professional exhibiting a related activity that they’re already doing. The goal here is to highlight both the promises and tensions in bringing participatory practicies into the classroom.

Concrete Activities - Definitely not full lesson plans, but short, modular activities tied to the modes and themes that can be incorporated by teachers into lesson plans

Resources - links and descriptions of related multimedia practices, projects, readings. Some will be linked to concrete activities, some will stand alone for teachers to develop into activities as they see fit or simply stand alone as illuminating and interesting resources.

Participatory Structures - classroom strategies that can be used in with any content, demonstrated in light of the particular modes and theme of the module

Our Plan

Our goal is to develop a pilot Module using the theme “Boundaries” (more on that in an up-coming blog post). By starting with a pilot, we can trouble shoot our process, figure out timing, scope, and scale. We’re definitely looking for input, ideas, and collaboration!

Themes and Modes: Categorizing the Debris

After going through the materials we collected on our Think Tank Day, Lana and I have been trying out different ways to sort all of these resources. We want to be sure to address the diverse geographic interests brought up in the think tank, from our own angle, participatory culture.

So, when we were grouping together materials, our categories fell mainly in two groups: participatory “modes” and mapping “themes.” These are two ways to slice the same materials, on one side along the modes of participatory culture emerging from the various work at Project NML, and the other along more traditional metaphors from mapping. What does this look like? Here are the categories we are currently working with, a group that is more representative than exhaustive, and a group that we hope will provide a valuable resource to educators interested in mapping and participatory culture:

Modes

Our current list of “modes” reflect some of the topics from our Project NML work:

Civic engagement, engaging popular culture, representational plurality, and modeling real-world systems.

This is very much a preliminary list, and terminology is going to be changed to sound a little less grad student-y (“representational plurality!?” yeesh), but we think it reflects the major intersections between geography and other Project NML work. (By the way, “representational plurality” is our way of getting at the idea that one thing can be represented in multiple ways, and it is important to be conscious of this in creating and consuming media. If you have a better word, post it in the comments!)

Themes

Layers, Boundaries, Production, Physical Spaces, and Stories.

These “themes” generally take features of traditional mapping and use them as metaphors, allowing us to integrate discussions about geography into a variety of other subjects, from the boundaries between social cliques in a cafeteria to the ways history is told via maps. More in-depth explorations of these different themes are forthcoming!

Initially, we wanted to find the overlap between these two sets of categories, say, aligning “stories” with “modeling real-world systems” and fuse them into a single list, but it seemed like this ignored some of the specifically interesting features of the two sets. So instead, we laid them out as axes—themes on the x-axis, modes on the y-axis. Using this conceptual coordinate system as a way to map (ha ha) our own work, we’re literally filling in a spreadsheet with useful examples and resources. So, for example, we’ll look for work that addresses the metaphor of “boundaries” with regard to “civic engagement.” Some of these intersections have clear examples from the think tank and our own research, and we’ll be sharing these here on the blog. Other intersections have us temporarily stumped (engaging popular culture with regard to the production of maps?), and we’ll be sharing those too, looking for interesting ideas.

These lists are a work in progress, and we’re hoping that by sharing them with the community, we’ll be able to get feedback on materials as they’re developed, meeting the needs of educators with an innovative and productive set of teaching resources.

Putting things together

Hi,

This is going to be the blog where we (Nick, Lana, and other NML co-conspirators) document the process of creating the next NML Teachers’ Strategy Guide: Mapping in a Participatory Culture. (Although, as with any introductory blog post, you know things here might change over the next few months as we work.)

We’ll be using this space to share ideas we’re having, ask for feedback from some talented advisors, and keep a record of what exactly it is that we’re doing.

More to come soon!