EDITING A COMMUNITY ATLAS

Children can create an atlas of their own community. This is a bound collection of maps covering topics that are important to them or which they think will be useful to their community. This is a project that is best introduced to your students after they have already had some experience with community mapping projects. They will first need to have created a community base map (Go to Making a Community Base Map).

A Personal Atlas

An atlas for each child that includes maps which they personally find interesting. This might include maps of all scales including the child's own bedroom and desktop.

A Classroom Atlas

The students may feel that it is sufficient for them to produce an atlas that is useful just for their own classroom, with maps that the children find interesting. For example, one of the children of Westminster West School in Vermont created a map of the locations of pets in the community. Another child mapped the locations that the children felt were haunted in their community and labeled it "The Ghosts of Westminster West".

A School Atlas

This might include different maps of the school grounds showing such areas as wildlife habitats, games, play and sports locations or sun maps showing the patterns of sunshine and shade in different seasons (Go to Module 2: Assessing and Improving the School Ground).

A Community Atlas

This is the most broadly interesting kind of atlas for a community. It includes maps of a wide range of phenomena in the community (Go to: Case Study of The Westminster West Atlas Project). The kinds of maps that might be included in this atlas range from orthodox kinds of maps showing the locations of housing, institutions and land to the creative contributions of children such as "The Ghost Houses of Westminster West". The atlas could also include maps that children may have collected in one of their community research projects such as the density of traffic on different roads in the community.

A Children's Community Atlas

This is an atlas intended for other children, identifying issues that interest and concern young people. There are a number of important potential values of such a product. First it might be of more interest to children of some ages than a more general community atlas. Young adolescents might find it particularly useful to have an atlas that shows the places that their peers deem to be important. Such an atlas could also be valuable for those adults who wish to better understand the perspectives of young people on their own neighborhoods. The students could produce such an atlas with this as a specific goal and make sure that it is delivered to local youth planners and public officials.

Specific Community Atlases

Children might conclude that their community could benefit from specific kinds of atlases. A Basic Services Atlas might be useful in some communities. A Cultural Atlas might be valuable for raising the awareness of both children and the larger community to the diversity of people in their community. This could include information on the different cultural practices, festivals, knowledge and skills of these cultures. Through oral history research with elders in their community children could also create a Historical Atlas of local lore. This would show such things as the origin of buildings, the sites of significant events and the history of place names.

Figure 20: Cover of an Atlas by and for Young People in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York.

The essential places to distribute these large atlases would be the school and community libraries. Depending on the size of the community and the scale of the map it may be possible to also reproduce selective maps for inclusion in a small atlas. The children could then carry copies of this home to their families and neighbors. It would encourage the readers to go and consult the master reference Community Atlas in the library.

Wigginton, Elliot (Ed.) (1991). Foxfire: 25 years. New York: Doubleday.