Doug Healy (history faculty) and Alison Safford (art faculty)

Developed at the Cambridge School of Weston

Background on Mapping Meaning Course

Maps are just nude pictures of reality, so they don’t look like 

arguments. They look like “Oh my God, that’s the real world.” That’s one of the places where they get their kick-ass authority. 

Denis Wood

Mapping Meaning is about many things, but one of the most important is to teach students visual, cultural, and social literacy that is directly related to making connections between ideas, events, people, and the workings of the greater society at large and our places and roles in it. The  ultimate goal is to create students who can interpret and connect information that is given to them, to connect it to the great world, and to ultimately become better informed citizens.

The course allows for multiple connections to be drawn and mapped mentally and physical, with the potential to unite all academic and nonacademic disciplines. 

(Through mapping, we can) form stronger internal and external networks of understanding, which leads to action, creation, and growth. 

The theory that parts of a whole ...cannot exist independently of the whole, and cannot be understood without reference to the whole, is greater than the sum of its parts. To me this is what mapping meaning is about. 

Will Close, (Mapping Meaning alum)

Why We Started This

Doug Healy and Alison Safford started this class after often discussing their love for maps, and a years-long back and forth about maps we found that show things beyond boundaries and capitals. Doug’s interest comes from a fascination with borders - political, cultural, economic, racial, religious - and the ways they create inequalities and injustices, as well as city planning, the ways cities - especially American cities - can be made more inviting to people rather than cars, and the stories maps tell, often without meaning to. Alison’s interest comes from an art background. She's interested in conceptual maps that show things that aren’t mappable. She is also interested in Guy Debord’s concept of the derivé, and psychogeography (how the physical or perceived boundaries of a space can affect our human actions and emotions), and how the performative act of walking can change how we experience a space and how a space’s design might control us. We were interested in exploring maps as a visual representation of human decisions, nations’ conquests, and the dreams of those in power.

What We Have Done in Class

We kept journals where students made maps based on the various themes: mapping the unmappable, mapping borders, mapping time, mapping power, and more. We led students on tours of the campus they know well, asking them to look with new eyes, to realize that landscape and architectural decisions can affect how they experience a space.

They then made maps telling their own stories of their campus, learning how the spaces between what is mapped can tell new stories. They read about Debord and psychogeography, explored a particular space, and created a word map of their experience in that space. They went to Chinatown in Boston, and made a map based on one of the five senses, focusing on the derivé (wandering). They traveled the same journey by car, and a slower mode of transportation, and mapped the difference between the two. We made a book map based on the idea of moving through space while using a determined system of marking. We map ideas of Marxism, personal power, a Hank Williams song, and other unmappable but known concepts.

Long-term Goals

We would like to bring Mapping Meaning to other schools via workshops and curriculum. We want to help students become citizens who can tell who made the maps they look at, what the maps tell us, what they aren’t telling us, and what can be deduced about the map creator’s place in the world. We want students to look at their cities and neighborhoods and the entire society with new eyes, to consider who they were made for and who they exclude, who they attract and who they repulse and why. We want students who can consider that cities/systems of power don’t happen by accident.

They can allow a tank to move through the streets, or encourage us to walk instead of drive. We want students to ask who made these choices, and why, and about their place as a citizens.

We have seen how students change during the course from assuming maps are factual information - how to get to Chicago, the capital of Belarus, to understanding that they tell stories related to power, imperialism, migrations and immigrations, gentrification and/or economic justice, access inequalities, and so much more. Ultimately, we want to help teachers explore with their students the idea that maps don’t just record boundaries, they tell stories.