Mapping

This classroom is found of their walks. The two educators and their preschool students walk regularly, several times a week and often twice daily, throughout the neighborhood. In the classroom there is a printout of a satellite map, with a blue path weaving through, marking streets. The map is accompanied by photos of locations known to children: paths, pond, puddle, fallen tree; these fit onto the larger map. All rectangles are plastic-wrapped for longevity. 

How might we move, pedagogically, past the regulatory technologies that view place from cosmo-colonial position of a satellite, condensing its depth into a layer of pixels? What materials might we invite to evoke (and to keep) the sense of openness and ongoingness of mapping, mapping as a process: map so far. 

A satellite image that captures the early-learning centre and adjacent streets is printed, in black-and-white (to disassociate from seasonality), on a large sheet of paper. Creased, its placed onto the floor and wall of the classroom (to trouble the image of maps as flat surfaces), surrounded by rolls of white paper. We walk, tell stories and map them. New layers of paper are added, the map is covered with semi-transparent vellum. 

We bring pens and draw. We invite charcoal pencils and draw light lines, and then forceful, thick dark lines. We trace lines with fingers and feet, pushing weight against the paper, multiple bodies condensed into small space on top of the image, foreheads pushed against the hard surface, pencils moving slowly, pencil moving so vigorously they tear the paper through, bodies shifting to follow the lines of roads, roofs, treetops. With both feet, a child steps onto the image: “I’m walking here!”