Counter-Mapping Community: Using Inquiry-Based Curriculum to Interrogate the Politics of Place with Fifth-Grade Students

This paper reports on a qualitative participatory curriculum study where 5th graders from southeast Wisconsin investigate the concept of community through a process of counter-mapping. Framed by place-based education and spatial justice, this counter-mapping curriculum centers student collaboration and analysis, which provides a way for students to share and complicate their relations to place and implicit spatial knowledge of community. Through this curriculum students demonstrated the ability to collaboratively analyze normative assumptions embedded in the idea of community. In the process, they interrogated economic, racialized, and colonial politics of place, and started to interrogate dominant white spatial epistemologies. Counter-mapping as a curricular method not only facilitates new understanding through a shared critical spatial analysis but can also cultivate new ways of relating to and being with one another that are essential for more-just spatial imaginations.