Using Childhood Memory Sketch Maps to Foster Discussion about Space, Place, and Mapping
Of all of the educational activities I have created, tested, and used over the years, one in particular seems to be often cited by students as memorable and impactful: Asking students to create sketch maps of their childhood neighborhood. In this essay and set of guidelines, I describe this activity with an encouragement for you to use it or your own modification of it in your own instruction.
Why use this activity?
1. It helps anchor the idea that humans are spatial creatures, bound to time and space, and that our brains contain mental maps of meaningful places in our past. Our childhood maps are among the most detailed memory maps that we carry with us, of a very large scale, of a treasure trove of information: The route taken to school, your friend's house, or the public library, the mean (or nice) neighbor's dog, the tree you sat below and read next to, or climbed, even down to the cracks in your own driveway or sidewalk. An interesting discussion as well is comparing spatial memories of those who grew up in a single residence or town vs. those students who moved multiple times in childhood.
2. It provides an excellent source for discussion in class--this activity is engaging, Note below that I include the requirement: "Comment on the maps from at least 2 other students in the class", although this is hardly necessary: The students are naturally curious about each others' maps, and usually comment on far more than 2 other maps.
3. As I include the activity toward the beginning of the semester (or in a one day workshop, toward the beginning of the workshop), it greatly assists in my goal of creating community in class, where they get to know each other, and if/when they get stuck in their GIS activities, they can rely on each other, and not just me as their instructor, to get "unstuck." Often, students build place connections with each other, "Oh, I grew up a short distance away from where you did!", or "we had a community swimming pool as well!".
4. It provides an excellent bridge to GIS and geographic themes and concepts: At what scale did you draw your map? What detail did you include? How did you symbolize trees, houses, and other features? Did you use single or double lines for streets? Is north at the top of your map, or not? What balance did you choose between human-built and natural features? What tools did you use for your map--paint, colored pencils, pens, or something else? Did you include a legend, a scale bar, a title, or other elements? How can maps tell stories? What can be a useful supplement to the map--videos, photos, narrative, audio? The latter question feeds directly into an exercise in story mapping later in the course or workshop.
5. The activity can be used in face-to-face settings as well as in online courses. The activity can be used inside and outside of GIS courses (such as in mapping, geography, graphic design, social studies, and others). It can even be used as an icebreaker activity for a keynote address or a presentation. It can be used from primary school to higher education. In fact, I've used this activity with students aged 8 to literally 80 (the latter, in the enrichment lifelong learning courses I teach for the general public).
Sample maps that students have drawn for this activity; all of the following are from undergraduates.
The above map includes a key and some interesting use of shading, patterns, and color.
I like the clarity of drawing on the above map, the very large scale, and the goat in the pasture!
The above map reminds me of all the song lyrics and poems that have been drawn on napkins and ordinary scraps of paper over the centuries!
The use of a straightedge on the above map adds quite a bit of character, and I wonder if the student had a keen sense of where due north was, and tilted the streets accordingly.
This student's unique handwriting added consistency and vibrancy to the map; also interesting to note that they chose to feature stores and prominent buildings while a simple "residential area" suited the student just fine.
The double-lined streets on the above map, labeling the streets in the middle of the lines, but not overlabeling, and the fact that not all text and buildings faced "up" was intriguing here.
It is interesting to compare what some students included, and what they omitted, and how much or little time they spent with the mapping activity, all lends variety and much discussion to this activity. The above map I found interesting for the orientation of the houses relative to the street.
That this map was of a smaller scale than most others, but still with filling in some carefully chosen detail are intriguing in the above example.
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The readings leading up to this activity, followed by the activity itself, are given below as are lifted from the most current version of one of my online courses. However, you could also use these readings and discussion in a short workshop as well.
Let us begin this week's readings by discussing some core fundamental principles--space, place, and time, then covering scale, map projections, geoids, coordinate systems, and a few other topics. All of this impacts the way that maps are perceived, how the world can be represented, and thus impacts your work as someone who will use GIS day to day on the job.
Space, Place, and Time. As you know by now in this course, GIS has value because its data is based on real locations and is concerned with the spatial patterns of those locations. These elements are fundamental to the science of geography (though there are certainly spatial elements in engineering, history, mathematics, design, and many other fields). You may have heard that history is concerned with chronos, time, while geography is concerned with choros, space. Note the difference in these two words!
While this has an element of truth, it is not the complete story. History is not the only field concerned with time. Because the way we organize spaces, and the characteristics of spaces, change over time, geography and GIS and cartography are also concerned with time. When cartographic analysts study spaces, they consider how those spaces came to be, how they have changed since then, and what that space will be like in the future. Each of these space considerations has to do with time.
Space, Time, and Place. Furthermore, mapping is also concerned about place, not just space. Space in geographic terms is the extent of an area. While it could be in a relative sense, such as a trade area, or an absolute sense, such as a specific wetland in Cook County Illinois. Space is generally objective, or divorced from values. Place, on the other hand, is a bigger concept. Place is bound up in the attributes and values that is associated with a location. Therefore, place is much more of a human-derived concept than is space. Think about the place in which you grew up. You most likely still have a strong attachment to it today. You may not have visited that location in decades, but you can describe a vacant lot, a park, a pond, a trail, a city block, or another spot there in great detail (that is, at a large scale). Not all of the memories are likely to be pleasant, either—the house with the mean dog that chased you on your bicycle, or the place where you sprained your ankle, are all bound up in your connection to place.
You will be asked, in the hands-on activity component of this week, to sketch a map of a place of memory that is important to you.
That place that you are thinking about and connected with is far more than the trees, landforms, buildings, and other natural or human-built objects on the landscape. It has meaning because of the memories and experiences that you had there. Attachment to place is one of the fundamental human experiences; it is what geographer Dr Yi-Fu Tuan termed topophilia (Links to an external site.) —love of, or attachment to, place.
For this course, think about: How can you convey not just locations or features, but -- the sense of place in maps?
Collections of places that are similar in some ways can be thought of as a region. A cultural region could be one with a certain housing type, or certain consumer preferences, or language, and a physical region could be one with a specific soil type, a combination of climate and vegetation (such as an ecoregion) or landforms. Again, think about how you can convey a region in cartography. Also, how can you convey the sense that regions often have, such as in the case of cultural regions or ecoregions, indistinct or "fuzzy" boundaries? Should those boundaries be shown as a "zone" and if so, how? We will examine this more in the uncertainty section of this course.
This week, you will have plenty of opportunities to develop skills with selected hands-on activities. You will sketch a memory map, explore a variety of ways to map change over space and time, examining a wide variety of data (imagery, bird flu, and more) in the process, and all the while expand your cartographic skills.
Memory Maps. In your readings you learned about space and place in the context of GIS and cartography and were asked to think about a place that is special to you. These "memory maps" are a fundamental part of our humanity--we are bound to spaces as much as we are bound to other important things in life, such as people and music. The place ideally is a location, neighborhood, street, etc., ideally, where you lived as a child, but feel free to think about a place that is special to you as an adult. Was it the route you walked to school on? The vacant lot where you played? The wetland where you explored?
For me growing up in western Colorado, USA, exploring the canals when they were drained in the winter, and the "washes" or arroyos cutting through the landscape were most special to me, including one that was not far from my house. I probably also could draw every detail of the park I walked through on the way home from middle school. Each day of the week, I walked a different way through the park. If it had snowed and the snow stayed long, I had great fun looking at my previous tracks.
Sketch the place you are thinking about on paper, choosing whatever scale, content, and symbols you would like, using whatever pencils or other physical items you might have available to you. Please don't use any computer tools such as Illustrator, Canvas, or a GIS! The idea is to make a hand-drawn map. Don't worry about making the most wonderful looking hand-drawn map but rather, think about while you are doing so, (1) space vs place; (2) what is easy to show on maps, and what things are more difficult to show on maps; (your feelings, the way the sun struck the rocks or trees, and so on). (3) the symbology, scale, and other fundamental map elements. (4) What is easier to draw with a GIS, and what is easier to draw in hand-drawn mode with markers or pencils.
On your map, include space for a few sentences that illustrate where your place is and why it matters to you so that this information shows up when you take a picture of it.
Take a picture of your map; make sure you name the picture appropriately so your instructor can determine which photo is yours, and submit it to this week's Dropbox.
Comment on the maps from at least 2 other students in the class.
Extensions to GIS
The discussion points I mentioned above provide several key bridge points to GIS. Another way to build bridges to GIS would be to geocode each of the student scanned hand-drawn maps to their childhood locations. If you are working with K-12 students, but even with university students, make sure their names are not attached to the maps and that their own house address is not shown on the maps, for privacy reasons. The resulting overview map could contain popups with each popup containing the scanned image. The overall pattern of childhood locations where students are from also provides a spatial point of discussion.
Another way of incorporating GIS into this activity would be to create a survey in ArcGIS Survey123, share it with students, and ask students to fill out the survey with the town in which they grew up, and attach their sketch map to their survey response. The resulting map is automatically generated from the survey and updates every time students input new data. You could even keep the same survey for the following semester and over time, the results become richer with information.
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Do you include this activity or a variation of it in your own courses? How do you structure such an activity? If you have not included such an activity in the past, are you encouraged to do so in the future? I look forward to hearing your reactions.
--Joseph Kerski