Teachers’ Perspectives on Map-Making in Geography Lessons

In today’s information and visual world, where misinformation, including in the form of maps, is often encountered, map-making is a beneficial activity and skill. Creating maps contributes to one’s understanding of cartographic concepts and helps to develop various geographical and cross-disciplinary competencies. Therefore, the authors aim to characterize teachers’ views on map-making in geography lessons in lower-secondary schools. To fulfill this aim, a questionnaire was developed, which 253 geography teachers then filled out. The results show that many of these teachers include map-making in a few of their lessons and that, in these lessons, pupils largely create less complex map types. However, the exalted status of drawing into outline maps, an activity that more than 90 percent of respondents consider map-making and include in their teaching, is worrying. This affected what the respondents frequently reported as reasons why their pupils make maps, such as improving pupils’ spatial orientation and imagination. The respondents also perceived many obstacles to map-making, including a lack of time for map creation in geography lessons and insufficient software equipment in schools, due to which they do not make maps more often and mainly make them by hand.