Norman B. Leventhal Map Center

Through its Empowering Maptivists project, the Norman B. Leventhal Map and Education Center (LMEC), in collaboration with the Boston Public Schools and the Boston Public Library, will teach high school students to use maps and spatial data as tools for advocacy and change. The project team hopes also empower teachers and youth community leaders by teaching them to use Geographic Information Systems and maps to help students understand how their communities have changed over time, and how the past impacts the present and future. Many Boston students experience the impact of blight, inequity, gentrification, and barriers these realities daily, but may have a hard time seeing what is happening in their city as a whole and thinking about themselves as part of the solution. Using its collection of maps from the 15th century to the present to connect school children, researchers, and the general public with its maps as tools for analyzing the issues of the past through the lens of today. The end result will be the creation of a model program and curriculum that can be used in schools and other youth-serving organizations to help students create and use maps and data visualizations in order to make informed arguments about public policies and understand historical and modern topics. At the end of the program, students' products created through project-based learning assignments and their presentation of these projects to the larger community at neighborhood branches of the Boston Public Library