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Engaging Students through Mapping Local HistoryKatharyne Mitchell a & Sarah Elwood ba Department of Geography , University of Washington , Seattle , Washington , USAb University of Washington , Seattle , Washington , USAPublished online: 24 May 2012.

To cite this article: Katharyne Mitchell & Sarah Elwood (2012) Engaging Students through Mapping Local History, Journal ofGeography, 111:4, 148-157, DOI: 10.1080/00221341.2011.624189

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Engaging Students through Mapping Local HistoryKatharyne Mitchell and Sarah Elwood

ABSTRACTThis article argues that the integrationof local history and geography throughcollaborative digital mapping can lead togreater interest in civic participation byearly adolescent learners. In the study,twenty-nine middle school students wereasked to research, represent, and discusslocal urban sites of historical significanceon an interactive Web platform. As studentslearned more about local communityevents, people, and historical forces, theybecame increasingly engaged with thematerial and enthusiastic about makingconnections to larger issues and processes.In the final session, students expressedinterest in participating in their owncommunities through joining nonprofitorganizations and educating others aboutcommunity history and daily life.

Key Words: historical thinking, civicengagement, digital mapping, interactivelearning, Web 2.0

Katharyne Mitchell is professor and chair of theDepartment of Geography at the University ofWashington, Seattle, Washington, USA. Her re-search interests include immigrant integration,democracy, and education.

Sarah Elwood is Professor of Geography at theUniversity of Washington, Seattle, Washington,USA. Her research interests include criticalGIS, participatory geovisualization, and com-munity development.

INTRODUCTIONIn Geography for Life, the seventeenth U.S. National Geography Standard appears

under the heading, “the uses of geography.” Entitled, “how to apply geographyto interpret the past,” the description provides a compelling case for integratinghistorical learning with geographical analysis. The authors contend that only byengaging with three different but interconnected points of view—those of space,environment, and chronology—can the human story be accurately told:

An understanding of geography can inform an understandingof history in two important ways. First, the events of historytake place within geographic contexts. Second, those eventsare motivated by people’s perceptions, correct or otherwise, ofgeographic contexts. By exploring what the world was like andhow it was perceived at a given place at a given time, thegeographically informed person is able to interpret major historicalissues. (Geography Education Standards Project 1994, 101)1

Unfortunately, the laudable goal of creating this geographically informedperson appears elusive in many actually existing classrooms, and both historyand geography remain the target of numerous school-related jokes. Geographyis often derided for a reputed reliance on memorization, while history suffers fora supposed emphasis on dry detail at the cost of the big picture. Writing abouthistory education in the United States, for example, the humorist Dave Barry(1997, 2) once quipped, “Another part of the problem is the system used to teachhistory in our schools, a system known technically, among professional educators,as the Boring Method.”

Part of the problem for teachers hoping to integrate geography and historylearning in the classroom is the broad-based suspicion by students that neithersubject relates directly to their everyday lives. For young teens especially,historical events can seem remote and abstracted from their own issues andconcerns. And as many educators have noted, early adolescent interests seemmore naturally inclined to focus at the micro scale: on themselves, their changingbodies, social relationships, and proximate encounters, rather than on the grandersweep and scope of historical processes and events (Eccles and Midgley 1990;Roeser, Eccles, and Sameroff 2000).

Yet while some make note of a seeming lack of early adolescent interestin engaging the world’s problems (Putnam 2000; Galston 2004), others havepointed to their passionate attentiveness towards things that matter to them,often characterized as subjects both literally and metaphorically "closer to home,"as well as technologically novel and exciting (Rheingold 2002; Zukin et al. 2006;Xenos and Foot 2008). Clearly, many adolescents have great enthusiasm for certainkinds of civic engagement, most notably those that involve their own social worldsand networks, as well as innovative forms of e-learning (Bachen et al. 2008; Flickeret al. 2008; Calenda and Meijer 2009; Greenhow, Robelia, and Hughes 2009; Santo,Ferguson, and Trippel 2010). Moreover, the ability to harness this enthusiasmis critical for their political as well as intellectual development. How then canteachers capture these passions and teach them history and geography at thesame time?

Our research on this topic speaks directly to a large and growing coterie ofscholars in education, the social sciences, humanities, and information sciences,

Journal of Geography 111: 148–157C©2012 National Council for Geographic Education

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Engaging Students through Mapping Local History

who are interested in young people’s use of new digitaltechnologies and social networking sites, and their potentialadoption in school environments (e.g., Alibrandi 2003;Callison and Preddy 2006; Wells 2010). What are thepotential learning opportunities afforded by embracing theteen digital revolution? How can this learning be tied toenhanced civic commitment? In what ways might newkinds of participatory mapping technologies be harnessedin pursuit of these goals? A key objective of our participantresearch is to engage these questions in geography throughthe use of new geovisualization technologies, and to buildconnections between new ways of representing space andhistorical learning.

A second goal of the article is to emphasize the value of in-teractive teaching and participatory research. In interactiveteaching the instructor elaborates on students’ commentsand expands their thinking through fostering conversationabout a particular topic. This can occur through pedagogicstrategies such as revoicing, uptake, and various formsof instructional conversation. At its most basic, revoicingis a discursive strategy wherein the teacher facilitates astudent discussion by rearticulating or reframing students’answers; revoicing both reinforces student knowledge andfosters greater student attention and interaction (O’Connorand Michaels 1993). Uptake involves teachers posingquestions that incorporate responses and feedback fromstudents (Nystrand et al. 1996). Instructional conversationemphasizes the importance of exploring ideas of relevanceto students through open-ended discussion (Leinhardtand Steel 2005). These pedagogic methods are consideredto be student-centered approaches to learning, involvingactive communication, collaboration, and participation bystudents.

In participatory research the students are actively en-gaged in the research project, and the researchers areengaged in teaching the students and attempting to im-prove their skills, knowledge base, and their understandingof the core ideas and issues under discussion (Kindonand Elwood 2009). Our participatory research involvediterative interpretive analyses of a collaborative process ofteaching and learning about mapping local history, not apre-test and post-test mode of evaluating a specific set oftasks. The value of this approach as a useful complementto other methods is that it can provide insight into theinteractive social process of teaching and learning, in thiscase helping us to better understand the process throughwhich students gain both research and mapping skills. Itis also helpful in understanding how they learn criticalthinking about geographies and histories over time andin concert with others, including both their peers and theirteachers (Wiegand 2002, 2006; Elwood 2009).

In the project introduced below we examined whetherand how a participatory and reflective process of learningabout local history could encourage young people’s civicawareness and interest in greater public engagement. Weinvestigated how interactive mapping technologies mightenhance such learning experiences by encouraging teams

of youth to research, compare, and discuss the cultural andpolitical geographies of their own urban neighborhoodscollaboratively and over an extended time frame (cf.Elwood 2006). Using Web 2.0 technologies similar to GoogleMaps, we developed an interactive mapping platform thatenables young people to map and annotate significanthistorical sites with comments, icons, sketches, and generalreflections.2 The platform also functions as a flexible digitalarchive where youth can compile evidence gathered fromtheir research activities and personal interactions related toparticular sites on the maps. In addition to online research,these include participant observation, visits to libraries, oralhistory interviews, and personal and family experiences.

As students investigated and located themes or eventsthat had occurred locally, they began to see the interconnec-tions with larger processes and regions. The interdependen-cies between the local and the global thus enabled them tofeel both personally connected to what they were studying,and also more attuned to the broader scope and sweepof history. In the final few group sessions, students alsoexpressed interest in the role that space plays in creatingsocial and economic insiders and outsiders, and also inchallenging dominant narratives about urban and nationalbelonging.

HISTORICAL THINKING AND GEOGRAPHICALENGAGEMENT

Project Design and MethodsThe research was conducted in an independent girls’

school located in a poor district of south Seattle.3 The classwe worked with was composed of twenty-nine seventh-grade girls, of whom 30 percent received financial aid and45 percent were girls of color. Our two-week mappingcomponent was connected to a larger five-week projecton the cultural history of Seattle. The broader projectinvolved the creation of a video documentary on the historyof a local Seattle group. The students chose to researchthe history of five different groups: African Americans,women, Filipinos, Japanese, and Chinese. Each girl wasassigned to a team of four or five students, and each teamthen prepared historical research on their chosen group.They also conducted interviews with local individuals whowere associated with the group in some way, includinghistorians, writers, academics, community members, andcommunity activists.

The online mapping component was introduced in six 2-hour sessions in the second and third weeks of the culturalhistory project. For the online mapping part of the project,students used our interactive platform, which supportsmultimedia mapping and interactive collaboration amongstudent team members. The platform allows students tozoom in and out from street-level to globe, to create andlocate features using the three geographic objects commonto most GIS/mapping software (points, lines, areas), and toappend additional media (such as text, photos, sketches,and videos) to each feature. A commenting function

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allows students to add additional content to the mapobjects created by others, a feature of our platform thatsignificantly enriched the collaborative nature of students’learning. As students (and also teachers) posed questions,answered questions, and added additional information tooriginal map objects, this running exchange created an ever-accreting record of the students’ learning.

In the first session, the students chose screen namesto use in the mapping platform, and experimented withthe platform’s basic tools for creating map objects, objectannotations, and comments. To yield a baseline under-standing of the students’ knowledge about the urbanhistories/geographies of the group they were studying,and their initial skills for cartographic representation, weasked them to think of a place that was important tothe history of their group, then to write it down. Usinga paper map of Seattle, they were then asked to situateit by drawing a point, a line, or an area on the map.After the students located something of significance on apaper map, we asked them to repeat this process using ourmapping platform. Repeating this initial mapping exercisein paper and digital forms allowed us to observe thestudents’ basic cartographic skills and their digital mappingskills separately. (The latter required some proficiency inusing the mouse to move between map scales, to re-centerthe map as needed, and to find and place the pin accu-rately.) Further, the introductory activity also seeded eachgroups’ collective map with several important historicalsites.

The research team was made up of two universityprofessors and two graduate students. The team workedin concert with the classroom teacher, and prepared adetailed curriculum for each of the six sessions. Eachsession involved active participation by the researchers.For example, the researchers helped the students to thinkof significant places for their group’s history with variousprompts. We also explained how to find useful historicalarchives and how to experiment effectively with the Webplatform. This approach is consistent with an interactive,team-based approach to teaching and learning. Notably,three of the four members of the research team wererelatively new to the city, and were learning about Seattlealongside the students. At the end of every session, allfour members of the team wrote detailed field notes aboutwhat he or she observed, and shared the notes with theothers. During large-group meetings with the students, oneresearcher led the discussion, while the others took notes.Maps and handouts were all retained and filed.

Linking Historical Text with Spatial ThinkingAfter the students located and placed a symbol (point,

line, or area) for their first significant map site, many thenexperienced difficulty in adding anything more to the Webplatform. Most of them had trouble understanding how toresearch historical information about places or processesof significance, and then representing this textual data ona digital map. Some difficulties included finding useful

sources online, navigating existing online archives, andfinding relevant information from urban history books.Others struggled with how to use place names as searchterms, or how to sift through the search results to identifythe best possible sites to explore further. One student, forexample, put “China” and “history” into Google’s searchengine, and ended up on a tourist Web site for the GreatWall of China. No matter what the prompts were fromthe researchers, on the first several tries many of the girlsstruggled with finding significant places for their groups.For many, it seemed that the concepts we were askingthem to apply (e.g., historical significance, Seattle, Japanese)were initially too abstract and removed and they ended upfinding things like sushi restaurants and defaulting timeand again to Google for the bulk of their research. This wasin spite of a list of good sites and archival resources suppliedby the teacher at the start of the project, and which theyhad downloaded onto their personal computers. (Thesesites included the Washington State Municipal Archives,Historylink, the Museum of History and Industry, andnumerous other sites and books related to each individualgroup’s Seattle history and culture.)

One of the initial problems we noted was an earlyinability to identify “history” with place, especially, itseemed, with the places of a familiar, everyday landscape.With our help, however, the students began to makemore direct connections between a good article or storypertaining to their group, and the Seattle neighborhoodwhere the event occurred. It was particularly helpful whenthey read about a building that was important, or abouttheir group’s literal spatial movement from one part of thecity to another, or across the country.

For example, Beyonce4 became quite interested in thestory of the Mercer girls. The so-called Mercer girls wereeducated women and teachers from Lowell, Massachusetts,who were encouraged by Asa Mercer to travel to Seattlefor jobs and husbands in the mid-1860s. Beyonce read thefollowing information on the Historylink Web site:

They would travel by train to New YorkCity where a ship would be waiting to takethem west to Aspinwall, Panama (then partof Colombia). From there they would jour-ney across the Isthmus by train to PanamaCity and then again by ship to San Franciscoand Seattle. The citizens of Seattle wereeager to welcome them into their homes andthe community while finding them jobs inthe various schools. (Historylink 2011)

After reading this, however, she was confused as to whythey didn’t just “go straight across.” When one of theresearchers explained verbally that they took a ship becauseit was a time before the airplane, the transcontinentalrailroad was not yet completed, and it was cheaper andeasier than cross-country travel, she still didn’t understand.But when the researcher and the student spent time lookingat a map and tracing the journey along the coasts, while also

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Figure 1. Students map the Black Panthers headquarters and note their contribu-tions to the local African American community.

comparing the difficult topography of the land crossing, shebecame quite excited. After this, she understood better howthe historical articles she was finding frequently containedthe information necessary to allow her to think about andrepresent spatial processes on the map.

At first, after the students began to find useful articlesfrom good archival sites, they just absorbed the informationand talked about it with each other and the researchers. Tobe effective researchers, however, they needed to develop aconceptual model for their search strategy (what counts assignificant), use search tools, identify something spatial orgeographical in the resulting content, and then translatethis into something map-able. These steps are all morecomplicated than it first appears. By the beginning ofthe third session, however, many of the students werebeginning to comprehend space and spatial relations ina new way, including how people actually moved acrossspace and were allowed (or not allowed) to live in specificplaces, and how this impacted their community and theirlives. They started to assess the information they werefinding for its spatial value (vis-a-vis adding it to theirteam’s map), and enjoyed finding photographs and videosto accompany the text and points on their map.

Using Local Data to Connect to Teen InterestsOne of the students we worked with appeared dis-

interested in the cultural mapping at first, often rollingher eyes, talking with friends, and drawing cartoons andnotes on our handouts. She became far more involved,however, after finding stories and places related to her ownFilipino heritage. During the third session, this student,Nonnie, learned about Mariano Guiang, a boxer of Filipinoheritage, who arrived in Seattle in 1924, and whose storywas captured as part of the Washington State Oral HistoryProject in 1976 (see Historylink 2011). Nonnie wanted tomap the boxing ring where Guiang fought, but found thatit no longer exists. However, she mapped the street cornerwhere the gym was once located, and in the process of

looking for this information,gained expertise in a number ofdifferent mapping and research-based skills. She also picked up onmore content-oriented knowledgerelated to the development ofthe Filipino community in Seattleduring the early part of the century.

Nonnie remained interested incultural history mapping after dis-covering that she is a distant rel-ative of one of the Filipino menthat her team interviewed for theirvideo documentary. And when oneof the researchers asked her toadd something from her own lifeonto the team map, she pinpointedthe Filipino cultural center as animportant historic site, noting that

the center still runs a variety of youth activities in whichshe has participated. She wanted to add “my school” to hermap as well, and when a researcher asked her why, shesaid, “because I go here—I’m Filipino, so there’s Filipinosat this school.”

Nonnie thus began to connect her own life to the historicalplaces and events that she was mapping. Some of theother students also found preliminary links between thepeople and communities they were studying and theirown lives. In the first week of the project MaxChow, forexample, discovered that her grandfather knew one of thepeople interviewed by her team. Another student felt thatthere might be a connection between one of the streetnames (in the International District) and her own last name.Even finding their own houses on the map caused greatexcitement and enthusiasm.

By the third and fourth mapping sessions all of theresearchers noticed a surge of interest in the whole project asthe students’ points, images, and text emerged online andwere commented on by the others. Prior to this, the archivalwork had seemed more like schoolwork, whereas suddenlyit became absorbing and fun when they could both see theproduct visually and connect it to their everyday lives andworlds. The visual cognition was clearly very important intheir learning, as was the sense of immediacy and relevancyof the content.

During the group commenting session on the finalday, we noted that the students researching the AfricanAmerican experience had underscored the fact that someof the people and places they were studying had hadsignificant social impacts on the contemporary urban fabricof the city. For example, after mapping the Black Panthersheadquarters (Fig. 1), they talked in detail about the socialservice provisions the group had coordinated in the CentralDistrict (where a few of the students lived), and howimportant these services still were for the community. Otherstudents also commented on the importance of communitycenters and nonprofits that had been active in earlier eras

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‘

Figure 2. Georgie places a pin at the Minidoka National Historic Site and discussesan interview with a former Japanese internment survivor.

of the city, and that were still in operation. Most of theteams included a cultural or community center such asthe Japanese American Citizens’ League, the NAACP, theChong Wa Benevolent Association, the Filipino CommunityCenter, etc. The final team maps showed the critical role ofcivic institutions in Seattle both as a locus for social services,activism, and resistance, and as a site for reinforcing culturalpractices and community ties.

What was most impressive, perhaps, was the growingability of many students to talk about these ideas at a muchmore macro scale or conceptual level than they could atthe beginning of the mapping sessions. At the start, theywere focused on neighborhoods and individuals, with verylittle ability to contextualize why these might have matteredsocially or politically. They did not include other relatedissues nor did they see some of the specific spaces or eventsas examples of broader processes or concepts. By the endof the two weeks, however, most of the students were ableto make these kinds of local-global connections. The teamworking on the Chinese experience, for example, talked indetail about the Chinese Exclusion Act, telling us quite abit about the social and urban implications of these formsof exclusion for Seattle, and how important the benevolentassociations were in supporting the existing communityduring those difficult years.

Scaling Up the Politics of the LocalThe researchers also noted that many students seemed

to be thinking in more complex ways about the interde-pendencies of significant places and processes. They wouldbegin from a site or place they had found interesting atthe local urban scale, and use it as an entry point to a richerdescription of historical and geographical questions. Kelseyand Bubbles, for example, called the researchers over to helpin finding something local they had researched and wantedto include on the map (Boeing Field); we collectively

then explained and discussed theimportance of the site in thebroader context of the migrationof women for industrial labor dur-ing World War II. This exchangemanifests the value of a participa-tory research project, wherein thestudents’ learning process can beobserved as a result of the close in-teraction between researchers andstudents. The main substance of theinquiry and how the students makeconnections between historical andspatial learning becomes evidentthrough active involvement withtheir struggles and insights.

In another example, the girlswho mapped Port Townsend(where several hundred Filipinoshad been quarantined) drew lines

between Port Townsend and Seattle, and then also drewa line connecting these places to the Philippines. At leasttwo of the teams placed markers on the nation from whichtheir group had originally migrated (China and Japan,respectively). Without prompting from the researchers, andwith a starting scale map of Seattle, the students zoomedout to place points regionally and also internationally.Their growing awareness and discussion of the spatialrelationships between geographical regions reflected notjust improved geographical knowledge, but also a growingunderstanding of the geopolitical relationships of specifichistorical periods.

Many of the girls began to get a good sense of thewider Seattle region as well, especially those who hadplaced points outside the city such as at Port Townsend orOlympia. They became adept at scrolling between Seattleand these points, and in the process learned about the wholeurban network. Overall, the students became much morecomfortable navigating through their maps, and gained agreater sense of where things were, particularly when theyhad to leave comments on their team members’ maps. TheJapanese team was particularly aware of how spread outtheir points were throughout the country because of theJapanese internments during World War II, and were eagerto show this off to the others through zooming betweendifferent map scales.

By the fourth session, the students began to employ awider range of representational choices, mostly the additionof lines to show movement from one place to the other, orto indicate a distant location. For example, in the Japaneseteam, Pengturt inserted a line linking Seattle and Texasto note the location of an internment camp where someJapanese from Seattle had been interned during World WarII. Georgie also placed a pin in Idaho at the MinidokaNational Historic Site, where she wrote, “Minidoka wasonce an incarceration camp. One of the people that we

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Figure 3. Bee draws a line between Port Townsend and Seattle.

interviewed was interned in Minidoka as a teenager” (Fig.2). In the first couple sessions, most symbols and relateddiscussions were pitched at the neighborhood scale, withthe historical cultural significance of the group articulatedin very broad terms: for example, as a place where people inthe group had lived, or sometimes even as simple as, “thisis where Filipinos are.” By the latter map sessions, however,the content and related comments (such as the above)began to be much more complex and detailed, involvingindividual people, forms of resistance/activism, spatialprocesses like internment, socioeconomic transformationssuch as women’s entry into the industrial work force duringWorld War II, gender stereotypes, and racial discrimination.

A main geographical connection was made on the penul-timate day, when the student teams all gathered togetherto talk about their maps. One by one, each team’s map wasprojected onto a screen, and a student volunteer clickedon one of the map symbols, which caused a photograph,text, and the comment stream to pop up. After noting thelocation of the symbol, reading the text, and looking atthe photo (or other graphic), one of the researchers leda discussion about themes common to many of the teammaps. One of the first themes to emerge was the waythat different groups had all been segregated or isolatedspatially in different historical periods.

Beginning with the Filipino team’s map symbol at PortTownsend (a place used to quarantine 339 Filipino immi-grants because of the threat of spinal meningitis—a threatlater reported to be unfounded), the other groups thenmade connections with the ways that their own group hadalso been separated from the dominant culture at differenthistorical moments. The value of collaborative research andinteraction came through in these group discussions andalso in the comments section of the Web platform. For ex-ample, when Bee mapped the quarantining of the Filipinosoriginally, she noted that it was conceivable that they werequarantined because of discrimination or other considera-tions, rather than the official rationale of the threat of conta-gion. She wrote, “It is even possible that the sailors wantedthe Filipinos away so they quarantined them. At this

time Seattle was segregated” (Fig.3). Bee’s mapped line from PortTownsend to Seattle, and her in-terpretation of what had hap-pened there to the Filipinos, pro-voked much further discussion andthought, both through a series ofcomments on the platform, as wellas in the group forum. The studentsused her findings and explanationas an entry into a wider discussionof the concept of spatial discrimi-nation as manifested in processessuch as quarantining, internment,redlining, and legislation such asthe Chinese Exclusion Act.

After looking at numerousdifferent points, areas, and lines on the maps, the studentsdiscussed how groups might end up in a spatial cluster fora number of different reasons. Some girls in the women’sgroup noted the importance of social groups advocating fortheir political rights as part of a committee or organization;others talked about the importance of sociocultural feelingsof membership achieved through the formation of localethnic societies. On her mapped point (Fig. 4), Nonnieindicated how the Filipino Community Center is still anactive and important organization in the city, with spellingbees and drill teams for children.

In the final session of the two weeks, the researchersfacilitated a group discussion concerning what the studentsfelt they had learned through the digital mapping project.We asked them to confer in pairs and small groups first,before opening it up to the class as a whole. What follows isa collective reflection on the learning process as explainedby the students themselves:

Bee: I learned things happen where theyhappen and why specific places have spe-cific functions. I started to see history whereit happens as opposed to when it happens.

Maxchow: I learned that a lot of things wereclose to each other and to me.

Funnygummi: I learned how the Filipinoshad to go to work but they lived veryfar from where they worked. . . this wasbecause of the restrictions on where theylived.

SSEdgar: I learned to visualize redliningbecause we outlined it spatially.

Nonnie: I could see that lots of non-profitand community organizations have per-sisted in the neighborhoods for a long time.

Bufanda: I see how everyday places are partof history. I see familiar places and knowhow they have changed over time.

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Figure 4. Nonnie maps the Filipino Community Center and discusses its ongoingimportance for children.

Spiggy: Before this I knew what happenedbut not where, like the Boeing women livedall together, but it was quite far from wherethey worked. . . how did they get to theirworksite?

Spongebob: I knew that the internmentcamps were far away, but now know exactlyhow far away they were, and how isolatedthe Japanese Americans were. They hadvery little space for such a big population.

On the final day the students were given a civic en-gagement worksheet to help us determine what links hadbeen made between the students’ historical learning andtheir present day civic awareness. The questions involvedproblems that had been faced by their group, what membersof the community had done to resolve those problems orchange the situation, how these events and processes had orhadn’t been represented on their map, and finally, whetherthe student or the class might get involved in solving anyremaining issues that their group was facing.

Students noted early problems faced by their group suchas redlining, discrimination, segregation, and racism, andmany also answered positively to the question of whetherany of these problems still existed in Seattle. Nonnie, thegirl who had become interested in the story of MarianoGuiang, and who mapped the Filipino Community Center,wrote “Racism” as a continuing problem in the city. Sheanswered the final question, “How might you or yourclass get involved in solving [these problems]?” in thefollowing way: “By taking part in some organizationsand volunteer to help kids or old people. Help kidsin Philippines” (Fig. 5). Bufanda, Bambi, and SSEdgar,from the African American team, wrote, “Stalk the policeand keep a tally of what races are pulled over and forwhat. Join the non-profit organizations.” Beyonce andCat, from one of the women’s teams, wrote, “Informpeople that everybody has equal rights; commercials;

write an article; advertise; stop ob-jectification.” Seaboo, Bubbles, andSpiggy, from the other women’steam, wrote,“We can help by rais-ing people’s awareness about thetopic (like the video documen-tary/pay it forward).”

After the two-week mappingcomponent was finished, the stu-dents completed their video docu-mentaries on the cultural historiesof ethnic groups and women inSeattle. They then showed themone evening to a large audienceof parents, teachers, communityactivists, writers, and other mem-bers of the Seattle community. In

addition to screening the documentaries, each of which wasapproximately 7–10 minutes long, the students answeredquestions posed by the audience. Many members of theaudience asked the students about what they had learnedduring the course of making the video. Several studentsspoke passionately about the discrimination faced by theirgroup in Seattle, their surprise in learning this history, theiradmiration of those who resisted it, and their determinationto educate people—including the audience itself, aboutwhat had happened in their own home town.

CONNECTING GEOGRAPHY, HISTORY, ANDCITIZENSHIP

Looking at the past geographically requiresthat attention be given to the beliefs andattitudes of the peoples of bygone timesregarding the environment, human migra-tion, land use, and especially their ownrights and privileges versus those of others.(Geography Education Standards Project1994, 103)

Efforts to link history, geography, and civics go back along way. In an article in the Journal of Geography, OliverNolan (1928, 77) discussed the important “correlationof geography, history, civics, and economics.” In it heexpounded his pedagogic beliefs, which rested largelyon the value of hands-on learning and engaging thepersonal interests, ethics, and motivations of the eighthgrade boys he was teaching. Beginning with shop activitiesrelated to tool making and electricity, Nolan taught aboutevery item and process that the students encountered, andfrom those beginnings—such as the “Copper Project,” hemade links to resources and resource extraction, history,international trade, geopolitics, and citizenship. All of thesewere grounded in basic geographic knowledge, but wereenlivened and enlarged through his ability to help studentsmake the relevant connections to other areas of learning

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Engaging Students through Mapping Local History

Figure 5. Civic engagement worksheet completed by two students investigatingthe Filipino community.

and to the ethical issues underpinning them all. His articleends with a final section entitled, “training for democracyat its best” (Nolan 1928, 82).

In the contemporary period, the “nugget of copper fromthe Calumet and Hecla mines” with which Nolan began histeaching has been replaced by electronic devices. The ped-agogic insights he developed, however, remain the same.It is still helpful to draw young teens in through appealingto their personal and social lives and building on their ev-eryday geographical understandings and incipient political

interests. The new digital technolo-gies can play an important rolein this as they involve the so-cial networks and means of com-munication most favored by earlyadolescents in the contemporaryera (Bennett 2008; Wells 2010).They can also be adapted eas-ily and effectively into interactiveand participatory forms of teach-ing and research, as demonstratedin our Web-based geovisualizationproject with the students. Interac-tive, student-centered teaching isgenerally heralded by educationalpractitioners as critical to the devel-opment of democratic learners andactive citizens (Beane 2002, 2006)Our own participatory research ex-plored these connections throughan examination of how contempo-rary geovisualization technologiescan be used in a collaborative learn-ing environment to develop criti-cal knowledge about local historyand spur greater interest in civicinvolvement.

The research documented hereindicates how increased knowl-edge and awareness about localplaces can serve as a basis forthe development of young peo-ple’s commitment to some formof democratic action. This typeof learning doesn’t just recordcultural histories and spatial re-lationships; it also shows whythey matter. An awareness ofour neighborhoods, our commu-nity histories, and their connectionsto larger forces can help createworld citizens—those concernedabout the local, but always in re-lation to wider forces and events.As Schmidt (2011, 107) writes:

Geographic education prepares students tothink about places and the people whooccupy and give meaning to these places.In doing so, geographic education asks stu-dents to think about themselves and othersin the world, particularly how our identi-fication with places affects how we under-stand people and places, far and near, asfamiliar or foreign. Citizenship is one senseof self attached to places and how we teach

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Katharyne Mitchell and Sarah Elwood

about places has implications for how stu-dents conceive of themselves as citizens.

It is the interdependencies between the places of localhistory and global processes which Web-based mappingprojects can help students to visualize and better compre-hend. We believe that understanding these forms of articu-lation encourages students to feel more directly connectedto the histories and geographies they are studying. It alsogives them a chance to perceive their communities andthe individuals and groups who were active in formingand defending them, as important actors in the historicalrecord. Finally, it allows young people the space to imaginethemselves as members of an ongoing community, and ascitizens and agents of change both different and similar tothose who came before them.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTSThe authors wish to thank their graduate research

assistants Ryan Burns, Elyse Gordon, and Tricia Ruiz fortheir help on this project. This work was supported by theNational Geographic Education Foundation [Grant #2008-UI03]; and the Spencer Foundation [Grant #20100052]. Anyerrors in the article are the responsibility of the authors.

NOTES1. This material can also be found on the

National Geographic XPeditions Web site.http://www.nationalgeographic.com/xpeditions/standards/17/index.html (accessed April 11, 2012).

2. The platform we developed is a fully open-sourcemapping interface that uses Javascript to displaybasemaps and student-generated map items inOpenLayers. The backend software products areMapServer and MySQL, served via Apache WebServer. A primary reason for developing our ownplatform was to allow primary and middle schoolstudents to engage with these basic geovisualizationtechnologies. (Under Google’s terms of service youmust be 13-years-old to have a Google account.)Using our own platform also allowed us ownershipof the data, and an ability to guarantee completeprivacy to our research subjects. For teachers wishingto use similar geovisualization technologies in theclassroom, Google Maps will accommodate most ofthe technological functions discussed here.

3. The research discussed in this article comprises thesecond year of a three-year research project. In thefirst year, the researchers worked with students inan afterschool YMCA program connected with apublic middle school, which was also located in apoor district of south Seattle. The independent girls’school was chosen as a result of proximity to thefirst school, relatively high numbers of children of

color (although not as high a percentage as in thepublic school), a good working relationship withthe classroom teacher, and as a way of determiningsome of the differences between public and privateinstitutional spaces vis-a-vis using the Web platform.

4. The students chose their own “secret names” tobe used as pseudonyms throughout the researchprocess.

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