Cartographic Literacy: teaching and learning through the use of thematic maps in the early years
ISBN 978-85-88783-11-9
Authors
1Santos, F.
1SEESP Email: fatima_legal@yahoo.com.br
Abstract
This paper aims to present some of the work of the doctoral thesis that was developed between 2010 and 2014 in the Faculty of Education at USP - FEUSP under the guidance of Professor Sonia Maria Vanzella Castellar. The purpose of it is to present ideas about the importance of teaching School Cartography in the early years of elementary school and teacher knowledge regarding the concepts and cartographic contents on this school segment. In continuing education course that we offer a group of teachers from the Municipal Education Network Itapeva-SP, we used thematic maps of the prototype Municipal School Atlas, among others, which sought to collaborate with the appropriation of educators teachers, regarding methodological referrals for cartographic Literacy, so that they can articulate the cartographic education developed with their students in the context of a more participatory education in the formation of the citizen. For the theoretical background, we turn to experts like Passini (2012) explains that in the Cartography "is a methodology that studies the relationship between the subject and the object reading to read" and is based on Piaget and Inhelder (1993 ) and Vygotsky (2008) from the viewpoint of the subject, and Bertin (1986), Gimeno (1980) and Martinelli (1991), from the viewpoint of the object. Lacoste (1988) map is a valuable tool for strategic understanding of space and is of paramount importance that the citizen is literate to know how to read maps and graphs efficiently and use these tools to act independently in space. Simielli (2000) considers that the ideal is to work with different maps for different users, mainly for various age groups, suggesting to students in the first years, basically Cartographic Literacy, as this is the time to start on the elements of the graphical representation for that can later work with cartographic representation. Callai (2010) suggests several possibilities for more meaningful work in teaching situations: Teaching sequences, the questioning and problem solving, contextualization, games, representation of space studied through drawings, maps, sketches, models, activities observation from the study of the environment in the vicinity of the school or the neighborhood, or other larger spaces in the daily lives of students. When incorporated into the cartographic language, mapping and scripts created from observation of everyday life, stimulates the appropriation of a whole wealth of symbolic language and conveys an instrumental research to become more accessible understanding of geographical concepts and space simultaneously provide elements of analysis and intervention in concrete reality where students live (Castellar, 2010). In the course of continuous training to teachers, we also seek to collaborate to gradually overcome obstacles on their initial training in teaching reading of cartographic language.
Keywords
Cartographic Literacy; Years of elementary school I; Teacher Training.