Best Practices: Sample Parent Workshop, Community Mapping

Other Best Practices

Host a City Lore parent workshop at your next PTA meeting!

Our workshop offerings include:

  • Family Folklore
  • Lecture-Demonstration with a folk artist from a culture represented in your school
  • Writing New York Stories
  • Local Learning
  • Community Mapping (visual & sound maps)
  • Using the Internet as a cultural research tool

Please contact the School Programs Manager at 212/529-1955.

*Parents, please take note! You are welcome to explore and conduct research in our multimedia library located at our offices on 72 East 1st Street in lower Manhattan. Please call in advance to arrange an appointment, 212/529-1955.

City Lore staff offers parent and family workshops in which parents, children, and teachers share family and personal experience stories and learn skills for documenting family and community traditions. City Lore staff work alongside participants in a structured series of activities designed to build literacy skills and promote cross-cultural and intergenerational understanding. Most parent workshops include a visual art activity.

Our parent workshops are generally done in schools hosting a City Lore arts-in-education residency, but that is not a prerequisite. We work with PTA leadership and school administration to negotiate fees.

Community Mapping Workshop

Background

Mapmaking is a wonderful way to engage family members in looking closely at how each member experiences the place where they live. Family members may discover that each sees their neighborhood differently, that one family member includes a place that the others never noticed, or that certain neighborhood spaces, such as a vacant lot, are valued by one member and considered an eyesore by others.

Objectives

    To engage family members in looking closely at how each member experiences the place where they live.
    To increase awareness of how close or far daily activities take family members from the heart of their community.
    To create a piece of visual art that draws on personal, community and familial experiences.

Workshop Outline

In the family mapmaking workshop at PS 29 in Brooklyn, we asked parents and children to close their eyes and think about their neighborhoods and the places that are important to them. We suggested that they start at their home and move outward, locating significant places and the people, activities, or memories associated with them. We gave them the option of looking at the neighborhood from the ground or sprouting wings and moving up to view it from an angle or from overhead (children younger than seven may not be able to do this). When they opened their eyes, we encouraged them to map the picture of the neighborhood in their minds, rather than worry about the scale or accuracy of the map.

We provided them with markers and pens and 8.5" x 14" paper, with the additional paper for those whose maps might grow as they worked. We gave families the option of working together on one map or having each member make their own map. Most chose to work individually. After drawing the map, we discussed the different perspectives we each had and why. It was an exploration and celebration of our diversity. As parent Luanne McLaughlin said, "We discovered that each member of our family saw our neighborhood—our world—differently. We each had a perspective that revealed our priorities, interests, and treasures. We discovered what it is that we really see and also what we fail to see around us. My family developed a greater appreciation for our home and for one another's view of what our home really means.We now know that all of us in teh community help to make it Home, Sweet Home! From the East River all the way to Coney Island!"

Bill's map (father)
Luanne's map (mother)
Madeline's map (daughter)
The McLaughlin family were the first to present their maps to the group, and we were all amazed (as they were) at how differently each family member—Bill, Luanne, and 5-year old Madeline—viewed their neighborhood. Luanne drew her favorite walk through the neighborhood, illustrating her map with the houses, flowers, birds, and parks along the route, as well as some of her favorite sites to visit in Brooklyn.

Bill drew the neighborhood stores where he buys bagels, rents movies, and gets his morning paper, as well as the nearby park where he flies kites, and the "escape routes" that he uses when he leaves the neighborhood or the city. Madeline drew her block and the sidewalk games, such as jump rope and hopscotch, that she and her friends play. The three maps not only showed how differently each member of the family uses the neighborhood, but also how close or far their daily activities take them from the heart of their community.

Resources

Sobel, David. 1998. Mapmaking with Children: Sense of Place Education for the Elementary Years. NH: Heinemann

Watson, Linda. 1997. Keepsakes: Using Family Stories in Elementary Classrooms. NH: Heinemann