{"id":179889,"date":"2021-12-17T07:27:10","date_gmt":"2021-12-17T12:27:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=179889"},"modified":"2021-12-15T09:19:03","modified_gmt":"2021-12-15T14:19:03","slug":"teaching-map-literacy-is-important-part-of-having-an-informed-public","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2021\/12\/teaching-map-literacy-is-important-part-of-having-an-informed-public\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching Map Literacy Is Important Part of Having an Informed Public"},"content":{"rendered":"

When the average person consumes information through sources like television, radio, a website, or a newspaper, they might do it with a critical eye. What is the viewpoint of the news outlet? Has it been trustworthy in the past? Is there another source for this information to get a second opinion?<\/p>\n

A map is different. People tend to look at maps as absolute information that should be taken as fact without analysis. But that’s a mistake, according to a pair of UConn professors from the Neag School of Education in a recent article published in Social Studies Research and Practice<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have to remember that maps are created by humans who have a purpose to make the maps,\u201d says Thomas Levine, an associate professor whose work includes preparing social studies teachers on the elementary level. \u201cThey have to tell a selective story and can\u2019t put everything on a map. It would be overwhelming. Maps are not a mirror of exact reality. The creators selectively choose what to put in and what to leave out. They choose borders, symbols, and even what colors to use. Color can impact what stands out in a map or what we notice in it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 Presidential election are two recent examples of how maps can be used as a tool for distributing information.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the article, we write about the importance of basic map literacy and items like how to use a key and understand scale, which is traditionally how maps are taught,\u201d says Alan Marcus, a professor whose expertise includes teaching history on the high school level. \u201cWe also write about critical map literacy and this is understanding the decisions that mapmakers make and what subjectiveness there might be in maps.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnother layer is digital literacy, as many maps are now online and we need to understand that maps can now be interactive and constantly changed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Maps from the 2020 Presidential election<\/a> can tell different stories depending on how the information is shown \u2013 whether it be a simple \u201cred\u201d or \u201cblue\u201d map on which candidate won the Electoral College vote in each state, a county-by-county winner map, or a map that uses \u201cpurple\u201d to show percentages of popular vote and not winner-take-all.<\/p>\n

\"A
A common way for maps to be accurate but misleading are maps showing county-by-county results in presidential elections, coded by color. While a glimpse at the map suggests an apparent landslide, more than half the U.S. population lives in 146 counties out of more than 3,000 (Adobe Stock).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cOur students who are training to become teachers debate on what maps should be used if they want to tell the truth about the election,\u201d says Marcus. \u201cIt\u2019s a very clear example of how maps can be subjective based on the decisions that a mapmaker makes or the purposes they have.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the ideas we are trying to get at in this article is that maps are subjective documents. They should be treated just like we treat any other document in a social studies classroom or how any adult in society should approach the information they are getting in the news.\u201d<\/p>\n

Understanding maps is part of a bigger concerns that citizens need to be properly informed as future leaders are selected.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think that the bigger context is that we live in a time where there\u2019s a lot of information,\u201d says Levine. \u201cThere\u2019s great concern a democracy can\u2019t survive or thrive if we don\u2019t have a shared set of facts. If we don\u2019t prepare people to use maps, including interactive maps, we increase the odds that we citizens will be manipulated by misinformation or very selective versions of the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

The COVID-19 pandemic has also seen a need for map literacy and has been a boom for online and interactive maps.<\/p>\n

\u201cCOVID was a motivation for us to do this paper,\u201d says Marcus. \u201cCOVID has not changed the way we use maps, but it has emphasized the importance of maps in thinking about public health, in determining public policy and a source of information that is important to society.\u201d<\/p>\n

Maps have shown prime locations of COVID-positive tests, hospitalizations, and vaccination rates.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe pandemic has highlighted how important maps can be and how much policy makers can use data from maps in driving their decisions about items like mask mandates and vaccines,\u201d says Marcus. \u201cCOVID has really emphasized how critical they are.\u201d<\/p>\n

The ease of creating on online map has made it even more critical for people to have a strong map literacy.<\/p>\n

\u201cContent online can be created by almost anybody now and it can be accessed by almost anyone,\u201d says Marcus. \u201cYou don\u2019t have to buy the newspaper, you don\u2019t have to buy the book and there is very little accountability and oversight in the production of some online maps. Online maps can be multi-layered and have hyperlinks, which you can\u2019t do with a static map. They can be updated and changed very frequently. That has made maps a different beast for public consumption.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

People tend to look at maps as information that should be taken as fact without the need for analysis, but that\u2019s a mistake<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":123,"featured_media":180004,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1855,2235],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2113],"class_list":["post-179889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-neag","category-today-homepage"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-23 00:45:43","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/123"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179889"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179889\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":180028,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179889\/revisions\/180028"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/180004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179889"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=179889"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=179889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}