What I meant was something like this: the research, screenshots, and reflective writing on the board made explicit what would have otherwise been tacit learning. If the kid had just set out a computer running his Parthenon in Minecraft, I’m sure it would have interested our guests, but without all the mapped-out learning around it, that computer, game, and model would have remained a curiosity – an inexplicable artifact outside its audience’s experience. Like a map, the Expo board positioned its audience to make sense of the learning territory the student covered. It oriented our visitors to the learning surrounding the technology and product and let them understand its position at the center of our shared attention to the work. In the paralance of our times, without the display board, the project would have been something like a “performance” or “score” (or, in the parlance of my time as a student, a “final draft”) – an abstraction that really didn’t communicate whether the student had learned or had arrived at class already ready to compose. The learning would have disappeared from sight for anyone who didn’t see it happen.
With the research, project documentation, and reflection around it, the model became something more than indirect evidence of some learning sometime. It instead became an illustrarted journey through time and space from ancient Greece to present-day Charlottesville, VA, from autumn to spring, from quietness to conversation, and from avoidance to engagement.
Completing the project and display board still took struggle – good struggle. The struggle to do what the kid saw himself doing. The struggle to learn not just content, but whether or not we could be different teachers and learners than we had been.
I think all learning should be mapped like this in schools. It is wonderful and the right kind of dangerous to do this work. It threatens grading; it threatens scores; it debunks “meritocracy” by showing clearly who is exploring or learning and who is spawn camping (staying where they are to get easy rewards) all along the maps of our kids’ experiences and our own professional ones. It asks teachers to show kids how to show their learning. It takes a vision – Does it work? Does it stick? Is this what you saw yourself doing? – and makes it a clear and concrete criterion for kid-owned success.
To learn how to do this – systemically or despite the system – is a good struggle. Definitely a struggle. Every bit counts.
If we can help kids learn to plot their own courses, can we keep ourselves from insisting they follow and re-chart ours? Can we redraw our own professional maps or begin them anew with the kind of democratic learning that depends on multiple tandem, tangential, and discrete paths to enrich our classrooms and communities?
There’s no map to tear up; there’s no established route to ignore; however, there is an opportunity to do more in schools than follow a path or stay between the lines. Maps are about so much more than that. We and our kids are, too.
There’s this book I love – Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke – in which two 19th Century English magicians become each other’s mentors and rivals while navigating prophecy, society, and war. At one point, Strange – the younger, more intuitive and upstart magician – works with the British to defeat Napolean. Strange uses his magic to completely reorient the roads being used by the French army, leading it into a quagmire and trap.
Could we pull of a similar, but much more hopeful trick? Could we help create learning spaces at peace with letting learners completely remap their learning out from under us? Could we let ourselves be led somewhere else in learning by the kids the system asks us to oppose or lead?
We live in a time in which it’s possible to see the rehearsal and the concert, the script and the play, the canvas and the painting. I think we can enjoy and extend the wonder we feel in watching how great things are made by fostering learning spaces that let kids capture, share, and value their wanderings and wonderings as much as we value and remain impatient for their arrivals.
There’s a lot of mapping to do – in community and as individuals – as we go along, and that can feel infuriating when we’re expected to make the curriculum run on time. But maybe there are better ways – alternate routes – to travel together through this life and our schools – and maybe we can use connected learning to compare notes with each other and our kids on how and where to find them. In the end, the maps are there to remind us of our human connections – they are portraits of our best and worst selves. How will we draw the last few maps of school?
Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Maps from Canal Creatures on Vimeo.
In wondering What is a map?, I’m reminded of earlier #clmooc questions like What is or isn’t a make? Maybe for our purposes we could posit some combination of these features as a “learning map:”
- Reflects choice.
- Documents a path of artifacts, insights, and process.
- Provides some explanation about how a route was chosen or otherwise came to be.
- Makes the work of the destination or product tacit and visible to the audience.
- Doesn’t separate the destination or product from the map.
- Recounts or provides for conversations about the journey.
- Remains open for others to travel, remix, counter-map, or complement with a new map of the same or similar learning territory.
What do you think?