In 2017, we were awarded one of 10 Ed Talks, sponsored by the Boston Education Foundation, part of the Boston Foundation. Our talk was called Mapping Meaning: Getting Lost with Maps, which gave a brief introduction to our class, methods, and reasons for teaching it.
“How can maps create a better course for teachers and students? Two teachers, Alison Safford, Art Teacher, Cambridge School of Weston and Doug Healy, Humanities Teacher, The Academy at Penguin Hall, show how maps can be more than a way around. They can tell stories that can teach a lot more than just where you are. Here’s “Mapping Meaning: Getting Lost with Maps"
It was a great experience with some wonderful support from the Foundation. Below is our talk, but all the talks were amazing, and available at the link below.
I spoke with Joanna van der Zanden last summer. She is a Dutch curator, writer, educator, as well as one of the originators of the Repair Manifesto and repair cafes, which have spread worldwide. I asked her what skills she thought were valuable for today’s students to have. She thought for a moment, and said they should be able “to see hidden worlds”. She mentioned the importance of noticing connections, relooking at the familiar, seeing potentials, and using a new eye all as ways of noticing invisible worlds and ultimately forging new connections.
The following online project is one that reverberates with maps’ potential to help us see the hidden.
Canon Zeedijk: Walking an Amsterdam Street Throughout the Centuries
Meeting Dio
I met Dutch historian Dionys de Hoog (also known as Dio), a friend of a friend, this past summer in Amsterdam. He was working on an online map of Amsterdam, combining a few of my favorite things: Amsterdam, maps, and hidden histories.
He showed me some of the basics of the website on a friend's iPhone. It was very much a manifestation of things we love to look at in Mapping Meaning.
His project, Canon of Zeedijk (link below), maps the architectural structures of Zeedijk, a busy street in the center of Amsterdam. Zeedijk is a busy street combining tourism, escapees from the Red Light District, a quick path from Central Station to Nieuwmarkt Square, or a good place to find amazing Chinese food at Nam Kee. The project shows incremental changes on the street since the 1500s, during various eras. These changes point to social and historical events, and the various powers that led to different uses of the plot that now holds a Buddhist temple. The maps show how the changes to a physical space, to brick and mortar, can reveal events, morals, and powers.
Dio is working with 3D digital artist Daan Claessen, and several Amsterdam educational and city organizations to create this interactive historical map.
Mission Statement from the website:
With this project we hope to make the residents and entrepreneurs of the Zeedijk even more proud of their street. If that succeeds ... then we also manage to make them deal better with the street and with each other.*
The maps represent both the physicality of Zeedijk, and uncovers the stories behind the physical. Connections are established across time, to the present: from Catholic monastery in the 1500s before the Protestant Reformation, to Jewish quarter before WW2, and after the war robbed Zeedijk of it's inhabitants, the area declined. During the post-war era the city tore down the buildings now in disrepair to build a playground. Once the playground was overrun by drugs coming in from the neighboring Red Light District, the present day Chinese temple was built as an anchor for the street's current community with it's own interesting story, like most things Dutch, related to the VOC and trade of the Netherlands (link below). As inhabitants changed, changes were made to the structures to repurpose and at times "fix" problems, such as the drug problem in the 1970s playground.
One of the most exciting aspects of it is a call for the public to contribute stories, old photos, and documents. Documents in archives tell stories, but this is a living, breathing neighborhood that demands current updating. Including the citizens to contribute to the history and experiences of Zeedijk, highlights a democratic and social aspect, and encourages a public connection to the project. The virtual provides an anchor for the physical community.
Community is a focal point.
The Workings of the Site
To experience it best, go to the website (link below), take a short tour (available in English as well), and explore. Each “?” link takes you to source material about the buildings at various points in time. This includes specific historic imagery, and their archival provenance. As you navigate the site, you can change views, and years.
Questions come up, about the history of the street, the town, and the country, and the people who lived there, and live there now:
Why was the convent abandoned?
Why did the buildings in a Jewish neighborhood fall into disrepair?
Why was there a need for playgrounds in Amsterdam post WW2?
Why was the playground plagued with heroin-users?
Who decided what progress was?
“Inquisitiveness and sensitivity are always important for me. I always ask myself why something is the way it is. A new world opened up when I began to study architecture. I became aware of what it means to design and build in a complex social environment, to intervene and change it.”
-Malkit Shoshan, architect, Harvard Grad School of DesignChange Makers, R. Jongewaard & A. Van Kesteren, 2017, Boijmans Museum
*The blog uses Dutch language (of course), which I ran through Google translate. Hence, it may read awkwardly.
Classroom Concepts to Explore
Some ideas this project stimulates for teaching and beyond:
First hand sources: How connecting parts of a story can form a greater whole?
Interactive navigation: The viewer becomes the author or detective in this search. You can research your own questions, and investigate various angles.
How to represent time: To think not just about the movement through a space physically, but through time; what was there before you? How did you come to this space? What allowed for it? (We have projects about representing how one moves through space in time, I would love to consider moving through time while in one locus).
Making a community more curious about their neighborhood: How does a community become more curious? More informed? Knowledge is powerful way to create community.
Learning to read a space: When you walk down a street everyday, what do you notice? Do different façade treatments mean the Jewish grocery store was once part of a Catholic convent? Can you imagine that what is now a Buddhist temple, was previously a open public space?
The importance of primary sources: How do you tell myth or assumption from accurate narratives? And while two sources can both provide information, how do we read the spaces in between to gain a fuller insight? To flesh out the story? A student's or citizen's ability to piece together information creates a greater narrative, and both social and civic involvement.
In May of 2017 we led a profession development workshop for teachers at the Boston Public Library's Levenenthal Map & Education Center. It is a fantastic resource, and has some wonderful workshops, exhibitions, and presentations that we highly recommend.
The teachers in the workshop followed in the philosophical footsteps of Guy Debord and went on a derive (drift) through the Back Bay. They then returned to the Map Room to create beautiful maps of their experiences. The focused on everything from architecture to the presence of government, to fire hydrants and parking meters, laws, and even an anti-Trump protest!
Mapping Meaning: What Urban Exploration Can Teach Students about Learning to See and Question
By Alison Safford and Doug Healy
On a cold winter day a few years back, we brought 20 students from our Mapping Meaning class on the T to Boston’s Chinatown. They were equipped with notebooks, cell phone cameras, a work partner, and instructions to notice both vortexes and things that pushed them away.
Mapping Meaning had grown out of our shared love of all things maps: Doug coming to it from a historical, political, and urban planning interest, and Alison through a filter of the fine arts, architecture, and interest in the Situationists. With the students we aimed to share how maps tell stories about history, power, individual and shared experiences, and much more. We aimed to use the examination and creation of maps to teach students to be culturally, socially, and visually literate, and to use art as a form of academic inquiry.
With this project we wanted to bring what we had learned in the classroom to light. We wanted to bring together Guy DeBord’s (Situationist International on the city) observations about how the city repulses and attracts us, explore the intentions behind the city structures, but, more importantly, do this through the students’ eyes. We wanted them to learn that their voices were part of the narrative of looking at the world, and that the maps we used to see as unquestionable “truth” came from specific points, places and people in history. There is a power in naming sources and realizing that the myth of universal truth needs to be examined.
The assignment was as follows:
You and your collaborator will gather information to be used in creating a map of your explorations. For this map, you partner both will take a “dérive" through Chinatown focusing on one of the senses….smell, touch, taste, sight, or sound.
“In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.”
-Guy Debord (1956)
Use the following ideas Debord talks about:
let yourself be drawn through the streets
look for areas that discourage your sense or movement: what discourages you from accessing or sensing certain areas?
identify fixed points and vortexes in your dérive
You will then create a document or object addressing your findings.
Things to consider:
How do you interpret your sense?
Do you include everything, or are you selecting or noticing some things more than others?
Are all things experienced equally?
How does the physicality of the space affect your experience? How does it affect your interpretation?
How will you present your final information? Does it need to be in map form? Chart form? Could it be a new form such as…?
What materials will you use? All materials you gather in Chinatown? Cloth? Could it be 3d?
The maps the students produced explored Chinatown through the senses, but specifically through the senses and experiences of these particular students.
Some of the maps the students created were:
a map of a conversation during a dim sum meal, exploring the differences between food traditions and family meals between a student from China and a student from Lexington, MA
a map of two students exploring Chinatown through eye contact, specifically “uncomfortable” eye contact. Who held eye contact the longest at what sites in Chinatown? It included a stare-down with a pigeon!
maps of overheard languages and where in Chinatown they were heard, exploring the diversity and locales of cultures inhabiting that space
a map laid out as a Chinese chessboard (chess is played in an outdoor-areas near the gate of Chinatown) examining how the structure of the chess board related to social aspects of two cultures meeting in the context of immigration
We were shocked (and excited) by the sophistication of the students’ maps. They were able to tie into personal narratives, the spaces of Chinatown and to larger social events and trends. They surpassed many of the goals we had for the course:
· To explore connectivity, how when one event happens it’s not in a vacuum, and that it is tied to the individual and their place in the world.
· To encourage students to tell their own stories, to make their contribution to the world
· To see the ability of a student to analyze and parse the world around them, as well as how others choose to portray the world, as relevant in the age of digital natives, the internet, and current concerns around fake news and alternative facts.
At the end of one class, a student said to us, “I will never be able to see things the same again.”
As teachers, it doesn’t get any better.
Bibliography
DeBord, Guy (1956). Les Lèvres Nues #9, reprinted in Internationale Situationniste #2 (1958).
