ABSTRACT
This book has attempted to draw together the evidence for children and young people’s thinking with maps and to use it as a basis for generating appropriate learning activities. The discussion has been presented in the context of fundamental changes that have taken place in the art, science and technology of cartography. There remain, however, a number of significant paradoxes and unresolved issues in relation to learning and teaching with maps. Maps are increasingly important in the real world yet the status of map learning in school seems even less secure now than in the past. Maps in the workplace are increasingly digital yet, despite massive investment in school hardware and teacher training in ICT, the take-up of digital cartography in education has been limited. Perhaps the most significant adult use of a map is to find the way, yet this is a skill not generally taught at school. Conversely, some school mapping tasks appear to have little practical utility for the world of work. Small scale maps, because of their greater generalisation, can be regarded as significantly more challenging for learners yet teachers generally assume that they are unproblematic in the classroom. The role of visual variables in determining how maps represent information is generally not recognised by teachers, yet this is a key understanding that children need in order to make their own maps, particularly when selecting from the wide range of options available to them in mapping software. Geography teachers, despite being under considerable pressure from competing curriculum areas, have not appeared to capitalise on the enormous potential of GIS: one of their subject’s most distinctive ‘unique selling points’.
