Learning with maps, learning through making maps The epistemological value of map drawing skills promoted in school texts between the late 19th and mid 20th centuries

CARLA LOIS

Asterdam

Conferencia; International Conference on The History of Cartography; 2019

Amsterdam University

Learning with maps, learning through making maps. The epistemological value of map drawing skills promoted in school texts between late 19th and mid 20th centuriesCarla LoisAlthough in the last two centuries it has been consolidated as an eminently literary discipline, at the end of the nineteenth century, the act of drawing maps and other types of cartographical diagrams was widely accepted as a useful exercise for thinking, interpreting and internalizing geographical information. In this presentation I analyze how the graphic skills promoted in elementary school geography varied from experiences, materials and activities developed in school institutions between the end of the nineteenth and the mid twentieth century.I will demonstrate that hand-drawing maps has been a fundamental tool in learning history, geography, geomorphology, climatology and other earth sciences, as a way to establish links among variables, to fix geographical contexts and to develop the ?spatial thinking? as a pedagogical and effective teaching strategy; for that reason, school textbooks devoted many pages to exploring diverse methods in order to promote the learning of graphic skills. I will also show that map-making as a pedagogical tool has been losing importance during the twentieth century, while verbal information gained importance and maps came to be used merely as illustrations for texts, with no instruction on how to make or study them; consequently, graphic maps started to be used intuitively and induced by what ?textual maps? described in school texts told about those (become) illustrative maps.Cases chose from different countries (the United States, France, Argentina, Brazil and Guatemala) will show that the patterns demonstrated in this study are international and general, rather than being dependent on the goals or reforms in one particular educational system.First, I will contextualize the place and spatiality of the maps in formal instruction instances, and their impact on the modes of observation (mostly, school walls, journals for children, and school textbooks). Secondly, I will analyze what type of map drawing was promoted in modern school instruction contexts and for what pedagogical purposes (such as step-by-step instructions to copy, trace, transfer information from text to (carto) graphic formats, among others). Thirdly, I will analyze the didactic functions assigned to various cartographic drawing practices and geographic images according to the instructions given to produce them. Here I will examine didactic and pedagogical books, addressed both to students and to teachers in which it is explained for what and why it is necessary to draw maps in the learning of geography. Finally, I will review some cartographic drawing exercises related to the application of geometrical principles and the development of spatial thinking included in school texts.