Chapter 9: Concepts and Tools: Geography: Mapping the Constitutional Convention

Most of our day-to-day interactions with maps involve using them to navigate from one location or another, and most often they are electronic and dynamic. In our research and experience, students are very familiar with using maps for this purpose (e.g., Roberts & Brugar, 2014). However, in a social studies context, maps can also be powerful learning tools when they serve as windows through which we can view geographic connections with social implications (Hinde et al., 2007). Maps, like other texts, are authored and designed to tell a particular story. Like an author (historic or otherwise), a cartographer chooses what information to include, exclude, highlight, and obscure, based on the message they are trying to convey to their readers. Unlike much prose written for students, that message is not typically explained explicitly; rather, readers have to make inferences based on the title, key, and surrounding text. This is hard work, and many of our students, in the absence of direct instruction on using maps to support inquiry and critical thinking, are ill-prepared to engage with them in these ways (Roberts & Brugar, 2014).