Late this spring I visited Picadome Elementary School here in Lexington to give a talk about geography and mapping. I wanted to convey what geographers do, and how mapping is more than just state lines and capitals.
Here is my presentation. Many of slides are linked to videos and online visualizations. The students were really taken with the idea that the internet could be mapped, and the Japanese earthquake visualization, as it often does, had their full attention. The grade levels ranged from second through fifth. After the presentation, the students and I made smell maps. We walked around the school and wrote down what we smelled on post-it notes. Then they tagged the smell locations on the large air photo of their school shown in these photos. From there, we talked about how what smells we mapped would differ for an old person and a younger person, and among people with different sets of experiences. We discussed how time of the year would matter too - December would produce a different set of smells. This tied in to the overall theme of how representation and the senses are part of geography as well as science. How we sense and categorize is a basic attribute of knowledge production, and geographers foreground these lines of inquiry in their work. Of course, we didn't have such an explicit discussion of these topics. I just wanted to give them an inkling of how mapping is much more dynamic and complex than what they might think. More of what we talked about was how to describe the smell of a crowded playground on a hot day? Exactly what do sweaty fifth graders smell like? Wood chips and warm tennis shoes under a salty beach blanket. Thanks to Ms Courtney the science specialist at Picadome, as well as Jeff Levy at University of Kentucky Department of Geography for printing out our air photo poster. Ms Mullins and Ms Exterkamp also allowed me to come into to their classes - they taught my kids this year, third graders.
