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Map Quest

Daniel Beaupre with students from the Mary Hogan Elementary School, Middlebury, Vt.

 

[caption id="attachment_943" align="alignright" width="319" caption="Daniel Beaupre with students from the Mary Hogan Elementary School, Middlebury, Vt."]

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When Daniel Beaupré, Ed.M.'99, was teaching history and English at an independent school in Middlebury, Vt., he would project maps onto the wall, enlarge them, and have his students trace the lines. Students loved the process and the size made learning fun. When Beaupré left the classroom after seven years and eventually began working at the National Geographic Society, the big maps were still on his mind. He wondered: If he could blow maps up even larger, perhaps enough to cover a gymnasium floor, would teachers be interested in renting them to help supplement their geography lessons?

Based on his classroom experience, he sensed they would, but pitching the idea to his new bosses would need to be done at the right time. "At National Geographic, great ideas are walking through the door every day," he says.

And then the right time came. It was September 2005 and National Geographic had just devoted an entire issue to one subject: Africa -- a rarity for the magazine that has been published since 1888. Inserted in the issue was a fold-out map of the continent.

"That's when I seized the moment," Beaupré says. "The stars were aligned." National Geographic decided to produce the first map, a 25' x 36' recreation of Africa, which was eventually trucked in a gigantic black plastic tube to a school in Northern Wisconsin. Five years later, there are now 10 vinyl maps of Africa, Asia, and North America, with the biggest stretching 31' x 41'. Each weighs, on average, about 145 pounds. Beaupré believes they are the biggest portable maps in the world. Eventually he wants to add other continents and also produce even larger maps that could be used in major public spaces like football stadiums.

As he had hoped, teachers and students love using them. "The maps make geography an event, something much more dynamic than a standard study in a classroom," he says. "A map makes it physical. Plus the ephemeral nature of it adds to its value -- it's a moment."

There is definitely a buzz that is created once the map arrives at a school, Beaupré says. Initially the teacher who orders the map will assume it will be used only with his or her students. But once the other teachers and students see the map unrolled on the gym floor, they all want to use it.

"I'm not exaggerating this," Beaupré says. "[The map] has a powerful effect on people. It arrests them."

And it's not just the visual wow factor that makes the maps popular: They are also surprisingly interactive.

"Not only are people permitted to walk on the maps, they are asked to walk, run, roll," Beaupré says. "We want this to be as much a physical experience as a mental experience." Giant props such as oversized dice, colored cones, and stacking bricks are also included for use with the activities, which are tied to curriculum.

"There's a certain Barnum & Bailey aspect to this," Beaupré admits, "but I've been careful in how the maps are portrayed. They are fun, but also content-driven and educational."

For example, students may spend time in class learning about where crops are grown across the United States. Later, moving to the map, the teacher will place hula hoops on different regions to test what they've learned. He or she holds up oversized food props such as carrots or bananas and students throw a bean bag into the hoop where they think the crop is grown. Students rack up points for being correct and for simply hitting the target.

An important force behind the activities is that they get participants moving. "We don't want kids sitting on the sideline listening to a teacher lecture," Beaupré says. Nor do they want adults being passive. Although schools primarily rent the maps, museums and festivals sometimes use them, too. Recently, the National Guard of Wyoming rented the Asia map to help local children better understand where their mothers and fathers were deployed.

Beaupré says the shelf life for each map, which is given a nickname, is about three years. The first map, "Beverly," was recently retired and is in the process of being donated to the Nairobi National Museum in Kenya with the help of fellow Harvard Graduate School of Education alum, Joseph Lekuton, Ed.M.'03, a member of the Kenyan parliament.

Photo: Trent Campbell

Ed. Magazine

The magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education

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