![]() ![]() This vision of the world harbors inaccuracies of its own, but generally it comes much closer to depicting the continents as they are. "Once students feel like the school isn't being truthful, there's a tendency to shut down and reject information," Frederick-Clarke tells WBUR.Įnter Peters' projection - which is also known as the Gall-Peters projection, since it's virtually identical to a projection put forward by the Scottish cartographer James Gall in the 19th century. And that can have a real effect on students of all backgrounds. Alaska looks bigger than Mexico and Germany is in the middle of the picture, not to the north - because Mercator moved the equator."Īll this adds up to a view of the world that sets one set of cultures center stage, while marginalizing and even radically shrinking others. "South America is made to look about the same size as Europe, when in fact it is almost twice as large, and Greenland looks roughly the size of Africa when it is actually about 14 times smaller. The Guardian breaks down some of the most notable discrepancies: The trouble is that his projection, which places northern Europe at the heart of the world and shrinks Africa and South America, is far from precise. The Meractor projection ( Creative Commons/Daniel R. And the central point on the globe for him was, of course, Europe. For Gerardus Mercator - the Flemish cartographer who in 1569 came up with the map still most commonly used today - the central goal was to support navigation along colonial trade routes. The issue rests partly in the problem of how to transpose the 3-D shape of Earth onto a two-dimensional sheet of paper. It only seems right that we would present them with an accurate view of themselves." "Maps that they are presented with generally classify the places that they're from as small and insignificant. "Eighty-six percent of our students are students of color," Hayden Frederick-Clarke, director of cultural proficiency for BPS, tells member station WBUR. "This is the start of a three-year effort to decolonize the curriculum in our public schools," said Colin Rose, assistant superintendent of opportunity and achievement gaps for Boston Public Schools, tells The Guardian. Introduced at a conference in Germany in 1974, historian Arno Peters' map aims to fix the Mercator's inaccuracies, which vastly exaggerate the size of land masses approaching the north and south poles - and in doing so, help prop up a decidedly eurocentric worldview. It's that map that hangs in most classrooms throughout the U.S., including those in Boston.īy contrast, the map known as the Peters projection, which city authorities are now meting out to many of the city's classrooms, is a relative fledgling. ![]() When many people picture a map of the world, what they're probably thinking of is a Mercator projection, a representation that despite its apparent distortions has been around more than 400 years. Students throughout Boston are getting a radically different view of the world, one laminated 24-by-36-inch sheet of paper at a time.īeginning last Thursday, Boston Public Schools administrators have been sending social studies teachers in the second, seventh and 11th grades new maps for their classrooms - depictions that more accurately portray the sizes of Earth's continents. ![]()
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