Signs and Realities: developing and exploring critical thinking with maps: towards a critical cartosemiotic pedagogy

The paper presents practice-based action research that develops and explores critical cartosemiotic pedagogy. The research builds on Lackovic's (2020) ‘Inquiry Graphics’, hybrid signs that place graphic data at the centre of learning exploration and inquiry, linking a multimodality approach and a theory of educational semiotics. The research addresses a gap in edusemiotics and higher education scholarship regarding applying maps to critically engage with complex spatial issues among spatial design students; to support students' exploration of space and place concerning identity and climate justice. Students are invited to creatively reinvent mapping an area as a personal composition of various geospheres - their cultural semiosphere, noosphere and natural biosphere. The project builds on the work of the map semiotician Denis Wood to evolve a semiotic framework to decode the position politics of these maps. Wood proposes a theory of map signs grounded in Barthes's two-tiered semiological system, the language and the myth, and presents ten codes to unravel the complex text of maps (Wood, 2010). Wood's codes were used in map elicitation interviews to interpret students' maps. The paper will be presented as an emerging Atlas. This multimodal document will bring together affective maps crafted by student cartographers, their reflections and an evolving cartosemiotic framework to decode the maps.

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