Information / Instructions
Author Sample Map -Kacen Callender (EMSB)
Teachers can use this demo map to show how students might map an author's residence, where they were born, etc. Read more below, for things to consider.
Our project actually began with mapping out information about the writer, and the writer’s ‘residence’ on earth. This could mean their place of birth, their past and current residences, or, for writers who moved around a lot, all of those and more."
We also used a ‘Literature-circle’ approach but students could start any project about a book this way. Students read graphic novels/illustrated texts in their circle. Some graphic novels engaged a writer and an illustrator. For example, Dave McKean illustrated David Almond’s text, Mouse, Bird, Snake, Wolf. So students had to map two artists. We were exploring the ‘big idea’ of the writer’s craft, and considering a writer’s political, cultural, and ideological influences. Class discussion about writers was noticeably shaped by the maps that students created.
We then proceeded to map the places actually mentioned and represented in the texts, which enabled students to explore another big idea – that of cultural appropriation. A cogent case was when students who mapped The Outside Circle, which is set in Edmonton, Alberta, and students who mapped The Silence of our Friends, which is set in Texas, considered the question, ‘Who knows the real story about what happened there?’