Teaching Geospatial Data Literacy Differently
By: Eric Robsky Huntley
Tags: Education, Data Literacy, Mapping, Maps, Boston

Who do you imagine when you imagine a ‘map-maker’? Mapping is frequently understood to be the domain of professionals, geospatial data scientists, cartographers; even when communities and activists take the lead, you might be inclined to imagine a room of exclusively adults, gathering and pointing. There’s no reason this has to be the case, which is why the D+F lab is excited to be working with the Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library (LMEC) to support Critical Geospatial Data Literacy among young learners in the Boston Public Schools. LMEC’s announcement of the initiative is here.

LMEC’s Garrett Dash Nelson and Belle Lipton introduce an MIT DUSP class to the Center’s collection of Boston-area insurance atlases, February 2020. Photo by Eric Robsky Huntley.

With the support of a grant from the Abdul Lateef Jameel World Education Lab, DUSP students and I (Eric Robsky Huntley) are going to spending the next year (ish) prototyping youth-oriented mapping tools, piloting teaching materials, and thinking through how to make learning modules ‘placeable’: which is to say built with translation to new contexts in mind. We’ll be building on the amazing work of the lab’s Public Data Fellows (Tess McCann, Missy Hill, and Sarah Lohmar), who began piloting teacher training materials and taught a course for adult learners in a similar vein this past semester.

Some of this work will be taking place in the context of a practicum class I will be offering at DUSP this fall. Practica are intensive, practice-oriented, and client-based courses that fulfill a key requirement of the department’s Master of City Planning (MCP) degree. (Thanks, also, to the amazing Tess McCann who will be sharing her considerable expertise and helping me to develop practicum materials this summer!)

Long-time followers and friends will know that D+F lab affiliates have been working on issues of data literacy for a while now; Catherine and Rahul built DataBasic.io to make key concepts in data science more approachable. So why, specifically, ‘geospatial’ data literacy? And what does it mean for data literacy to be ‘critical?’ Our answer would be that mapping has distinctive promise and distinctive problems for educators, young learners, and feminists.

The Databasic.io interface.

On the one hand, maps are powerful tools to support place-based learning and to connect young learners to their neighborhoods and communities. They allow their users to learn and make arguments about how neighborhoods have been, how they are changing, and what they might be in the future. But there are also entire bodies of academic (and non-academic) literature devoted to thinking through the unique problems posed by maps (sometimes specifically for feminists!). In terms of privacy, ethics, and, most importantly, power, maps post special challenges. Who gets to make the map and speak to the story it tells? Does the map acknowledge the map’s partial perspective? Whose eyes are implied by the map — the mapper? Or nobody in particular (the so-called ‘unmarked subject’, implying a white, cisgendered, able-bodied man)?

The point is that we think these perspectives should be taught together, even for young learners. Along with our friends at the Leventhal Center, including its incoming president Garrett Dash Nelson and its education team, as well as an advisory council of teachers from the Boston Public Schools, we’ll be developing materials that help young folks learn to map, but that also introduce them to the responsibilities that come with mapping.