Historical Cartography and Teaching: A critical analysis on the didactic material used in the state of São Paulo, Brasil
ISBN 978-85-88783-11-9
Authors
1Jordão, B.; 2Sena, C.
1USP Email: barbaraflaire@hotmail.com
2UNESP Email: carla@ourinhos.unesp.br
Abstract
Maps express the cultural legacy of a people about their geographical knowledge. They originate from the idea of representing their needs and location, to designate a relative position of the objects in a certain physical space, whether for their own knowledge or the knowledge of future generations. Since the historical, social, scientific and technical contexts reflect themselves in the representation, maps change constantly. Learning through historical maps allows students to realize and analyze those changes in space through time, which is reflected in the representation. It is said representing, but it is actually meant interpreting. A map is the result of a series of choices, for example, the cartographer, who uses the graphical language to communicate what was demanded from him, by choosing the symbols, colors and shapes to achieve the ideas, and also the user, who is the reader of the map. This last one is the one who conditions all the other levels of choices, considering that in order to obtain a positive result at the desired representation, the cartographer must try to reach the user by taking his cultural characteristics and background into account. Hence the representation of the geographical space contains in itself the idea of the interpretation of the space through the many spheres which involve the cartographical production. At the elementary school a more direct contact between the future users and the maps occurs. In schoolbooks those representations appear in a great number, however they do not make a reference to the text and they are used without exploring its potentialities in the process of formation of the readers of graphical representations. In the case of historical maps, this situation is even more serious since they do not appear so frequently in those books and they end up being mere illustrations, which are more artistic than cartographical. Since 2009 a common curriculum for all schools was implanted in the state of São Paulo. Materials such the “Caderno do Aluno” and the “Caderno do Professor” (Student’s book and Teacher’s book, respectively) are distributed by the government and bring suggestions of exercises to be applied in the classroom; many of those exercises concern maps, including historical ones, but the approach of the book is superficial. The research which has originated this work analyzed the historical maps present in the Geography material mentioned above and discussed the methodologies which are most adopted in the classroom. Interviews with Geography teachers, elementary and high school students were made as well as historiographers and geographers, based on the qualitative method of research. Problems concerning reading and interpreting those maps were identified. Since the Cartography teaching in Brazil is generally superficial and focused only on the identification and memorization of some elements of the map (the North, the captions, and so on) – despite the fact that all the researches on the topic affirm that those elements should only be one step to a conscious reading of the map – it results in the formation of students and teachers who are not able to understand that the historical map is a record of how society organized itself and represented its space in a different period of time. It is frequent to hear from students that historical maps contain “mistakes” in comparison to the current representation of the same space. By affirming such thing, they do not realize that the historical representation is a record of a certain conception of the world in a certain time, which can be different from the way we represent it today, specially through the geotechnologies. Effectively, the teaching of Geography based on map reading considers maps as accessories of written documents and do not consider them as a specific language or instruments of power. However, the research proved that the reading of images and the utilization of visual materials, among them the use of Historical Cartography, emerge as a privileged strategy in the process of both teaching and learning of Geography, in an interdisciplinary perspective with History, Art, Math, Technology and specially the cartographical science.
Keywords
Historical cartography; didactic material; Geography teaching