Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
alization tools for many complicated tasks that would have been text-based just a decade
or two ago.
Maybe that's why old-school geography failed: it was just lists of names and places. It
wasbetterthannothing,wefoundwhenwelostit,butitwasn'twhatkidsreallyneeded.IfI
grewupamapheadjustbecauseofsomeinnateknackforspatialthinking,maybethat'sthe
magic bullet for our map-impaired society. Imagine the rallying cry: “Spatial ed now!” Or
maybe “Weare all spatial-needs children!” There are plenty ofwaystoteach maps without
making them into a litany of “mere description,” as Peirce Lewis put it. In 1959, the cog-
nitive psychologist
Jerome Bruner complained
, as Rousseau had, that geography was too
oftentaughtpassively,withoutanythoughtorexplorationonthestudents'part.Hehitupon
the idea of dividing a group of children into two classes. One would learn an entirely de-
scriptive geography: “that there were arbitrary cities at arbitrary places by arbitrary bodies
of water and arbitrary sources of supply.” The other class was, like David Helgren's, given
a
blank
map. They were asked to predict where roads, railroads, and cities might be placed
and were forbidden to consult books and maps. A surprisingly lively, heated discussion
on transportation theory emerged, and an hour later, Bruner finally acceded to their pleas
to check their guesses on a map of the Midwest. “I will never forget one young student,”
wrote Bruner, “as he pointed his finger at the foot of Lake Michigan, shouting, 'Yippee,
Chicago
is at the end of the pointing-down lake!'” Some students celebrated their correct
prediction of St. Louis; others mourned that Michigan was missing the large city at the
Straits of Mackinac that they themselves would have founded.
Bruner had succeeded in taking the thing we take most for granted—the map of our
home—and making it new, making it into an adventure. You can do the same thing just
by turning a map upside down, as the writer Robert Harbison observed when he inver-
ted a map of Great Britain. “
Its meanings have shifted
and the whole as an integer easily
graspable has disappeared,” he wrote. “Now features have explanations, so the portentous
interruptions in the coast of Britain are caused by rivers, self-justifying and uncaused no
longer.”Inamapshoprecently,IcameacrossanAustralian-madewallmapthatinvertsthe
entireworld,sothatAustraliasitsproudlyatoptheother,lessercontinents,whiletheNorth-
idents will no doubt be happy to hear that I felt a moment of gripping existential nausea as
I considered this Aussie-centric view of our planet, no doubt ruled by Yahoo Serious from
his cavernous throne room within the Sydney Opera House. But it was thrilling as well to
see familiar annotations like “Japan” and “Mediterranean Sea” printed over strange new
contours, as if the whole planet had been redecorated overnight. At its best, this is what
geography education can do: give maps back their sense of wonder and discovery.
