Mapping
Example 1: Using Digital Mapping Tools to Think about Physical and Virtual Classroom Spaces
The physical setting, or Euclidian space, of the first iteration of an upper-level class titled Rhetoric and Civic Engagement was what Leslie imagines to be fairly typical. The class was assigned to a third-floor room with long, unmovable tables and a “technology station” at the front of the room. The room was windowless with one door. Because of the class title and purpose, Leslie hoped students would engage with the campus and community around them. So Leslie began to think about how to expand the space of the classroom: How could she make the classroom—or objects in it—generate space for community-centered, collaborative writing?
Leslie realized that instead of fighting the space, adding digital tools could expand its possibilities. She could expand the space of the classroom by recruiting other digital tools, tools that would be useful both in her classroom and in other places. Leslie hoped that digital tools selected by students could become a sort of object that traveled with her class to other physical locations but also one that could create new objects, and new spaces, that could reshape the authority structure of the class and how the classroom (and other writing spaces) were used.
In one project, the class decided to use Google Maps, a tool with which some students had no familiarity and with which some were quite competent. The major assignment in the class was a group project where Leslie asked students to map transportation issues on and around their large campus. Leslie built different steps of the assignment as students made decisions about the information they were encountering. Therefore, a traditional assignment structure was ineffective. The first step was for students to identify ways in which campus transportation worked well. Amy Diehl, Jeff Grabill, Bill Hart-Davidson, and Vishal Iyer (2008) noted that when community organizers map the sites of problems (deficits), then outsiders see only problems. The class also tried to identify what was not working regarding campus transportation—and there were a number of areas that they identified. Each student in the class had his or her own experiences with getting to and from campus, and each also began looking beyond those experiences. They conducted surveys of students on buses, of fellow cyclists and pedestrians, looked at parking lot complaints, searched Tumblr for UCF-tagged transportation posts, and more.
After students identified an extensive list of transportation issues, they each selected one issue for the project. Students chose such items as bike racks (in addition to existence, they looked at placement and design), intersections with frequent jaywalking, sidewalks that end, campus and beyond-campus shuttle systems, parking deck capacities, and more. Leslie and the students in her class then discussed what useful ways these ideas might be placed into a Google map and tried to narrow the focus of the project. Thus, the campus map began as an assembly of things. Those things included the classroom on the third floor with one computer and projector; the software called Google Maps; the roughly twenty-five students and one instructor in the class; and the experiences of each of the students getting to campus, parking, and getting around campus every day as well as the information they gathered from their peers.
Over the course of the semester, these things and the work students were thinking through articulated via a map some transportation challenge on campus and became objects that coordinated activity. One object was a campus map for students on campus without a car. Another was a map that instructed people how to ride, or hack, the private apartment shuttle bus system as a campus transportation option. These objects were, in some ways, within the university walls; they could be (and often were) called up on the screen of the large computer in our classroom. But they also existed (and still exist) as searchable maps in Google. They have, since the class, generated all kinds of activities beyond the class, which we will return to shortly.
Even in the class, the map-objects started to generate interesting activities. Students were able to take the work of the class and extend it to other Euclidian spaces. One student in Leslie’s class worked at the campus writing center, and following in-class discussions of both the mission of the project and the infrastructure of the classroom, took a small group of students with him to the writing center after class to do some work. The class only lasted fifty minutes, which often was not enough time for in-depth conversations about the goals of a collaborative map. This student introduced the others to the space of the writing center. Because the students were there alone, and the student employee was familiar with the space, the classroom configuration of teacher-in-front, students facing and following, was disrupted. Leslie stopped by, and noticed the students gathered comfortably in a corner around a whiteboard. The writing center student led the group, taking notes on the board, while a couple of usually reticent students—and one who was often late or absent due, of course, to campus transportation issues—made major contributions to the conversation. Because the students moved the work of the class, and because they chose the space and time, they did not reproduce the structure of the sanctioned classroom space, yet their object still traveled and made a new writing space. Leslie wondered, as all instructors might, what the key to this change was, and whether it was the new, writing-tool-filled, nicely segmented writing center space, or whether it was the student employee's comfort in a space intentionally set up to support collaboration between peers.
Sometimes, the map-objects did not generate innovative activities around or thinking about writing; though sometimes the students were in the physical classrooms, and sometimes they were not, some of their roles stayed the same no matter where they were. The “thing” we call writing was too stable in their heads; it could not bend so far as the writing Leslie was asking students to do in the class. For example, one rather large group attempted to put several “things” or ideas on one map, a map intended for students on campus without a car. This was an extremely collaborative activity, and one that needed leadership. A student who regularly sat at the front of the physical classroom took charge of “writing” the framing narrative for this map. He coordinated the activity by emailing each person working on the collaborative map and asking a series of questions. He then gathered their answers together to write a framing narrative. This student had a particularly hard time with the class. He kept asking when we would do “real” writing—on paper, in the classroom. At the same time that he was taking important leadership in a meaningful collaborative writing project, he was still waiting for the class to begin in the sanctioned virtual and physical spaces that he defined as the classroom.
Unlike the previous students who were happy to move the location and the organization of the classroom from place to place, this student’s definition of “real” writing only included that done in sanctioned classroom spaces. To Leslie, this offered a warning that if we are going to shift, add to, and alter classroom spaces using digital tools, we should articulate to students why and how we are doing this. The student mentioned above was an on-campus resident who did not have a car. After he asked when the “real” writing of the class would begin, Leslie talked to him about how he managed to get to the store and other places. He said that he posted to the “Graduating Class of 20xx” Facebook page asking for rides. Leslie pointed out that this nonsanctioned writing work did things in the world for him. In order for it to do things in the world for other people, he would need to add this to the Google map of campus transportation challenges, carrying his practical, unsanctioned writing work “into” the sanctioned space of class writing. We think this is a good example of how associations of objects can flow two ways in writing classrooms spaces. Objects have to be associated with and validated in the classroom if they are going to create useful new writing spaces. Leslie invited the student to move these writing things, Facebook posts and everyday shopping tasks, into the space of the classroom.
Leslie and Doug had a discussion about how to handle this on a larger scale. They concluded that actually asking students to articulate a theory of writing in class would be a good start. We suggest beginning by asking questions like: What is writing? When is writing? When does writing get things done? How often do you use it? This exercise, in Leslie’s experience, takes some nudging; students won’t immediately list the mundane and nonsanctioned writing that they do—they don’t think of it as “writing.” Ideally, we suggest doing this at the beginning of the class, so that students can look back, revise, and reflect on their theory of writing as they move through the work of the class and as they assemble final class reflections. It is, perhaps, only when we do this that students can participate in the creation and use of writing objects that move easily from the classroom to other spaces; that change the way the classroom works even before moving; and that allow important thinking and writing work to be done at kitchen tables, on the bus, and in new sanctioned and unsanctioned spaces on and beyond campus. We think this is an activity that writing structures do every day. However, what we think is key is that this unsanctioned writing activity became validated as sanctioned because it was then integrated into the classes’ specific writing object, the map, which also traveled between sanctioned and unsanctioned spaces. In other words, the associations became twofold, both adding to classroom discourse and also becoming more useful, simultaneously, in and outside the classroom. For Leslie, the key is to create an assignment that integrates previous unsanctioned writing from multiple students and combines it in a new object that can travel across sanctioned and unsanctioned writing spaces. In other words, she tries to create assignments in situations where stable arrays of networked objects have a chance to form and generate new kinds of writing spaces in both networked and Euclidian senses.
As a final note, we think that it is important for instructors to understand and accept the degree to which they will not be in control of such writing objects once they have been created. In the case of Leslie’s class, she has seen the map-objects pop up in campus discussions far after the end of the semester. One example is demonstrated by figure 12.1 below; Leslie’s campus wanted to survey students about bus use patterns. Though Leslie happened to see the post and suggest linking to the map project, a student campus leader who was not in Leslie’s class had already noticed the object, brought it to the Student Government Association and the campus transit authorities, and was moving forward with her own agenda using the map-object to assist her.
Figure 12.1: Facebook thread related to campus transporation survey
Figure 12.2: A student realizes the power of online writing to get transportation work done