Teaching Packs

Welcome to the Public Map Platform teaching resources! This suit of bespoke resources can help educators engage learners in meaningful conversations about the places they inhabit.

These resources and activities are mapped to the key Areas of Learning and Experiences (AoLE) within the Curriculum for Wales. They are designed to be flexible tools, ideas, activities and inspiration to support inquiry-based learning. By following a child-centred, experiential approach, these activities can enable learners to lead their own investigations, pose their own questions, and reflect on their local environment.

Why Mapping?

Geographers, planners and urban designers have always been interested in maps, which traditionally have been viewed as objective and ‘truthful’ representations of reality. Today mapping is much more than this, it can be a powerful medium for “exploring ‘what is out there’ as well as ‘what is inside us’” (Soini, 2001; p.225). By engaging with these resources as part of an active and inquiry-based pedagogy, learners develop:

• Spatial Awareness: Navigating and understanding their surroundings, both physically and socially, and
• Critical Thinking: Collecting and analysing data, developing and exploring their own ideas and those of others, and devising solutions for their communities.

Inquiry-based framework

Our resources are underpinned and informed by our own participatory research with children in contexts within and beyond Wales, and draw from the work of educational theorists such as Dewey and Kolb. Grounded in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and the Welsh National Participation Standards (opens in new tab), the resources allow children to follow an experiential learning cycle, moving through concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualisation and active experimentation. We have designed the resources around these principles:

• Non-Prescriptive Design: These packs are a "suite" rather than a syllabus. Educators are encouraged to choose and adapt activities that align with the specific lines of inquiry emerging in their classrooms.
• Child-Centred: Learners lead the investigation by posing their own questions, generating original data, and reflecting on findings.
• Action-Oriented: Learners can devise solutions to issues in their local areas and take actions where appropriate, reflecting on the process and their learning.

This framework promotes problem-solving and enquiry, and stresses the importance of connecting to children’s real-world experiences.

Explore our resource themes

Our packs are organised under four themes: social mapping, environmental mapping, cultural mapping and symbology. You can choose specific activities that align with the questions learners want to explore. For example, children might investigate the air-quality in their local area through environmental mapping, or use social mapping to identify where people meet, play and speak in Welsh, play and devise ways to make their neighbourhood more youth friendly.

Themes and Focus Areas

1. Social: Mapping where people meet, play, speak in Welsh or connect with nature and designing youth-friendly spaces.
2. Environmental: Assessing air quality, biodiversity, and renewable energy sites.
3. Cultural: Connecting to place through storytelling, memory, and creativity.
4. Symbology: Visualising the intangible as well as the tangible; turning ideas into animated map symbols.