CHAPTER 6

Mapping the Terrain for Meaningful Learning Using Technology in Social Studies
ELIZABETH A. ASHBURN, MARK BAILDON, JAMES DAMICO & SHANNAN MCNAIR
Maps are tools for helping us navigate from here to there. They also offer new vistas, paths of
possibility, and expanded horizons. Historian John Lewis Gaddis compares the craft of the historian
to that of a cartographer. The cartographer’s skills of creating patterns and relationships help give
meaning to the ambiguities and complexities of a terrain by reducing “the infinitely complex to a
finite, manageable, frame of reference” (2002, p. 32). This metaphor of maps is useful in addressing
the question of what teachers need to know and be able to do to teach for meaningful learning using
technology. It provides images and language that can help educators understand what it means to
navigate this “infinitely complex” terrain of students’ achieving enduring understandings of content
(in multiple social studies disciplines in this instance) and of using technology in ways that foster
understanding (Jonassen et al., 1999; Wiggins & McTighe, 1998; Wiske, 1998).
Given the broad terrain for learning in social studies, constantly changing learning contexts,
and the opportunity for technology to both simplify and complicate the terrain, skills in using maps
and other tools for navigation are helpful. More importantly, teachers need to know how to map the
location of learning at any given moment, so that instructional decisions build on the context in ways
that move students effectively toward learning goals. The options for these instructional paths are
infinite within this terrain for learning in social studies because of the nature of “here” (beginning
with students’ current knowledge, experience, needs, and interests), “there” (achieving enduring
understandings of complex ideas, skills, and content in multiple disciplines), and the diversity of
possible content and paths for the learning journey. Mapping in each moment the location of
students in the terrain is critical to know what subsequent instructional steps will scaffold and guide
them toward a particular journey’s end. As the report from the National Research Council’s
Committee on Developments in the Science of Learning states, “Knowing where one is in a landscape
requires a network of connections that link one’s present location to the larger space . . . [I]t is the
network, the connections among [learning] objectives, that is important” (Bransford et al., 2000, p.
139).
To map something means to establish or concisely describe with clarity like that of a map.
This is different from making a map, which denotes creating an actual representation of a static area
in some physical form. Concisely describing the location within “a network of connections” in the
learning terrain illuminates possible moves toward the objectives. Mapping skills, then, are those
that enable the identification of the terrain’s particular features, the determination of one’s location
in the terrain, and the articulation of relationships among the features, the location, and the
objectives in ways that inform instruction.
To further explain the importance of mapping for navigation, an example may be useful.
When one of the authors realized that she was unable to get to a known destination efficiently
because she was traveling through unfamiliar territory, she called en route to a colleague to ask for
directions. Her colleague, of course, was unable to respond until she knew the author’s location.
Being unfamiliar with the terrain, the author had to perceive and then explain clearly the key
features of her location. Not unlike the classroom context, her sense of urgency to make a
navigational decision was intensified because of rush-hour traffic, the number of lanes, and the need
to know where to turn. Because she knew key features to attend to—such as street names for the
one she was on and the one just crossed, the railroad tracks in the distance, and her relationship to
her starting point—and she had a mental model of street maps in general, she was able to create a
set of information that located her position to get directional help.
Project TIME’s approach to teaching for meaningful learning using technology offers a
framework and a set of tools to help teachers do this kind of mapping in the instructional process. In
this chapter, we respond to the question of what teachers need to know and be able to do to teach
for meaningful learning using technology by discussing how a major component of this project
addressed the question. Although the discussion is built around the example of Project TIME, we
think that the general principles and ideas apply more broadly. (See the Introduction and chapter 1
for further description of Project TIME’s work.) The project’s framework and set of tools help locate
with greater clarity the features and details of particular moments in the journey through the
learning terrain in ways that indicate progress toward student understanding and how the path
might need to change, what perspective might need shifting, or whether backtracking might be
needed.
First and foremost for mapping the journey, teachers need to know and understand key
features of the terrain for learning. The space of the terrain is what needs to be navigated, from here
to there—from students’ prior knowledge and understanding based on their experiences to
specified learning outcomes. The terrain for learning considered in this instance is the social studies
disciplines. Typically, this terrain is determined by particular content defined by state curriculum
frameworks accompanied by student learning standards and benchmarks. Often implicit within the
frameworks and standards are big ideas and methods of the disciplines. Project TIME’s approach has
emphasized these latter two components as explicit features to be addressed intentionally. The
meaningful learning attribute of content centrality focuses on big ideas and methods of the
discipline, in addition to subject matter content (see chapter 1). Because they are key to locating
points for connection along the learning journey, they form a stronger and clearer definition of the
terrain for meaningful learning.
Second, teachers need tools for mapping learning contexts, which, unlike roads and
mountains, are constantly changing in the classroom. Project TIME has focused on three kinds of
mapping tools, each of which delineates details that are important for locating at any particular
point where students are on the learning journey. The tools Project TIME has used that help
teachers map the learning journey are:
1. A clearly defined four-step process of disciplined inquiry: explore and develop questions;
gather and evaluate information; analyze and interpret data and information;
communicate new understandings. Students’ engagement in active inquiry is one of the
six attributes in Project TIME’s MLT framework (see chapter 1).
2. A unit of instruction: the Mexico and Migration unit. This unit defines a sequence of
learning tasks and assessment guidance as a route to reach a specified set of learning
goals. Similar in concept to mapping an automobile journey, it lays out a model for how
a 120 Meaningful Learning Using Technology journey might be made when technology is
integrated into learning experiences characterized by the MLT attributes.
3. A set of technology tools that contribute to moving efficiently and effectively through
this complex learning terrain (see Appendixes A and B).
In the next section, we describe these tools and the three features of the terrain for
learning. Then, using data from one of the project evaluation case studies, we describe ways in
which one teacher used these tools and mapped the course for his students through the learning
space defined by these key features. We also include some of his reflections on how he understood
the development of his own knowledge and skill as he taught the Mexico and Migration unit. Finally,
we reflect on ways in which Project TIME districts have supported teachers in developing these kinds
of understandings and skills in teaching for meaningful learning using technology.

KEY FEATURES OF THE LEARNING TERRAIN

Big Ideas
Big ideas, as Project TIME has used the term, are defined by two important characteristics. First, they
are core conceptual frameworks and principles that experts within the discipline recognize as
powerful for interpreting the social and physical world. Research on the knowledge of experts
indicates that it “is not simply a list of facts and formulas that are relevant to their domain; instead,
their knowledge is organized around core concepts or ‘big ideas’ that guide their thinking about their
domains” (Bransford et al., 2000, p. 36). Second, big ideas open windows within students’ worlds by
making the complex more accessible through reframing and renaming students’ experience. Big
ideas act both as lenses that can relate, integrate, and transcend isolated concepts and bits of
information, and also as glue that can make coherent connections between the subject matter
content and students’ personal experience.
In the overview to Project TIME’s Mexico and Migration unit, the importance of big ideas is
explained:
In this unit, students explore their life experiences within the context of big ideas central to
the social sciences and relate their own experiences to the unit’s subject matter content.
The intention is that they will begin to develop the big idea lenses of social scientists. Most
students are unlikely to have developed such large mental models. To help students
organize their knowledge around big ideas, this unit starts by connecting students to their
lived experiences—in the classroom and school, as well as personal histories—and by
scaffolding the development of these big idea lenses in ways that make sense to them. It
then relates these personal contexts to the unit’s subject matter content and, finally, to
applications in the world beyond.