From designing new lessons on rural and urban land use, to charting how Native American land has shifted over the centuries, teachers from the Borchert Map Library’s second annual teacher fellowship are reshaping geography education for K-12 students across Minnesota. 

The Map Library launched its first teacher fellowship in 2023, inviting five teachers from the Twin Cities metro area into the University of Minnesota Libraries to learn how to integrate geographic information systems, like ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS StoryMaps, into their classrooms. 

Following the inaugural fellowship’s success, five more local teachers set a course for the Libraries, and after three months, the cohort created new open-access lesson plans and teaching materials that are freely available to everyone. 

“This fellowship allowed us to pursue what we’re passionate about and what we feel like students would really need,” said Kathryn Rotunda, a social studies teacher at Chaska Middle School East. “I’d love to do it again, but I know that’s not an option. I was just really impressed with the time that we were given, and the resources and the partnerships that were created.”  

Rotunda, of Lakeville, Minnesota, has been a teacher for the past 14 years. She currently teaches US History, civics, and modern global studies in Chaska, and maps are a common landmark in her classroom. 

“We use them so much in teaching, but oftentimes the maps that we teach are pretty static,” she said. “The opportunity to create my own lessons where my students can dig a little different than just the surface level was exciting.”

Educators in Chaska have recently been discussing how to include more lessons about local history, specifically around Native-American history, and how to recognize native cultural heritage in our everyday lives. These efforts follow the Minnesota Department of Education’s new standards for teaching social studies, Indigenous Education for All, which “integrates Anishinaabe and Dakota cultural, historical, and contemporary contributions into Minnesota’s K-12 curriculum.” 

Rotunda wanted to create lesson plans for these new standards, lessons that few other teachers in Minnesota would have the time and resources to create. So for her project, she used maps from the 1800s, crafted by a female cartographer, to illustrate how native land in the state was taken and redeveloped. 

“It was something that I could productively do to help teach new information and new standards to my own students,” she said. “I think they’ll be really excited. Mapping is always something that all students can be successful with.” 

Unlike other fellowships she’s participated in, including ones in Germany and Washington D.C., the Map Library gave her the agency to mold the fellowship into what she needed and what would be useful for her students, she said. It also gave her the time and support she needed to design lessons that her students would engage with, that would capture their curiosity and push them beyond surface-level fact sheets. 

“It was amazing. I’ve been a part of such a responsive team. Ryan, Shauna, and Melinda were so excited to help us craft our lessons and had so many great ideas and resources that I wouldn’t have access to as just a regular teacher,” Rotunda said. “I’ve never had the opportunity to craft lessons alongside experts.”

‘That’s why my community looks the way it does’

Meredith Aby-Keirstead, a teacher at Kennedy High School in Bloomington, Minnesota – where she teaches AP Human Geography, AP World History, and US Government – completed two projects during the fellowship: one on urban land use and the other on racially discriminatory housing practices. 

Aby-Keirstead, who has been teaching for 29 years, frequently uses Minneapolis neighborhoods as examples during her unit on urban land use. And while her students quickly understood urban concepts like mixed-use development, they weren’t as familiar with Minneapolis’ features as she anticipated.

To help them better visualize these concepts, she decided to use an example they’d all recognize: their own neighborhoods in Bloomington. 

She created lesson plans to show how the suburbanization process swept through America, changing rows of corn and soybean crops with scattered farmhouses, into rows of single-family homes with green lawns and multilane highways. She also used aerial photography to track the urban sprawl of the Twin Cities, and especially of Bloomington, throughout the 20th century. 

“That’s going to be really enlightening for them, to be able to look at these concepts that they study about in the urban geography unit, and then being able to apply them to their own home community, and be like, ‘That’s why my community looks the way it does.’ That’s going to be eye opening for them,” Aby-Keirstead said. 

Many teaching materials on urban geography, especially around suburbanization, are focused on Chicago, she explained. But most of her students have never been to Chicago. She wanted to make lesson plans that would not only be more relevant and resonate for her students, but also for educators in the Twin Cities and throughout Minnesota. 

Her second project focused on racially discriminatory housing practices in Minneapolis and its suburbs, using maps of racially restrictive covenants and redlined areas to demonstrate how those policies contributed to present-day disparities. 

“What’s the relationship demographically of the areas that were redlined and the areas that were racially covenanted? And then what types of populations live there today?” she said. “These were racially discriminatory practices of the past, and they’re not legal anymore, but they still influence the demographics of these neighborhoods today.”  

The team at the Map Library helped her find which maps would best fit with her educational goals and which maps would tell the stories she’s trying to convey to her students, Aby-Keirstead said. They also made ArcGIS layers so students could manipulate the map themselves, seeing the relationship between governmental policies and changes in the local landscape.  

“It was awesome. The people at the Map Library were so helpful, and they never acted like my questions were stupid,” she said. “They were just always generous with their time … And they were always very responsive when I asked for help.” 

Aby-Keirstead wants her students to use the skills they’ve learned in geography to analyze their home environments and cultural landscapes on a day-to-day basis, which is why students need to be familiar with the same GIS tools that professionals use in the real world, she said. And their analytical skills will be much stronger and more effective when they have historical context for their communities. 

Teachers can tell their students that historically redlined neighborhoods have a disproportionately higher population of Black and brown people decades later, but they might not remember it. 

But if students can manipulate map layers of Minneapolis, and see for themselves how North Minneapolis contrasts with the rest of the county, and how that process began with redlining, racial covenants, and suburbanization, then it will stick with them long-term, she said. 

“If students read something, they might remember it. But if students find something out themselves, they will remember it,” Aby-Keirstead said. “Students are always more interested in doing things than listening to things.”