Research on Cartography for School Children - Maps for the Future Children Education and Internet - page 219

Chapter 18
Research on Cartography for School Children

Rosangela Doin de Almeida

Abstract The aim of this article is to present research about cartography for school
children carried out in the Research Laboratory for the teaching of Geography and
Cartography (LABENCARTOGEO) of the Postgraduate Program in Geography of
the Geoscience and Exact Sciences Institute of the State University of S˜o Paulo
(Rio Claro Campus, S˜o Paulo, Brazil). This laboratory was created/founded in
2005 with the objective of carrying out research with teachers and schools, based on
the Qualitative Research of Education approach. Since 1996, we have conducted
theoretical studies using this methodology. However, in this article we are going to
include information from previous studies so that the reader can follow our line of
approach. We are going to present you with some background information regard-
ing studies of teaching maps to children in Brazil, with the purpose of embedding
the themes that we investigated in our research framework. At the end we will
recommend future directions for the research to be conducted by researchers from
LABENCARTOGEO.

18.1 Introduction

When LABENCARTOGEO was founded, two pieces of research were carried out
on the base of Jean Piaget's (Piaget and Inhelder 1993) learning theory and his
recommendations for the teaching of maps, which will be mentioned at a later stage.
We developed three extensive studies from 1998 to 2008 as to how to produce local
school atlases and the professional development for teachers. More recently, we
have been working with multimedia cartography and the Internet and also with time
and space references in kindergarten and pre-school education. We intend to
present the methodology used and the results of all this research.