UChicago’s well-known undergraduate Core Curriculum serves the goal of “cultivat[ing] in students a range of insights, habits of mind, and scholarly experiences.” This series of blog posts highlights ways in which technology can support those valuable habits of mind. In service of aligning those tools with sound pedagogy and actual practices, we spoke with Jennifer Spruill, co-chair of the Power, Identity, and Resistance sequence in the Core, whose insights informed part one of this series, on the practice of “commonplacing.”
When you’re mapping the path from location to location, the most direct route may be the best one, but the most effective path to understanding a complex text or set of concepts in class can be somewhat more winding and circuitous. Counterintuitive though it may seem, students can be brought to a deeper understanding of rich, linear texts by separating, manipulating, and rearranging important ideas in spatial relationships. Concept mapping, this approach of analyzing, taking notes, or working out ideas spatially, has occurred to many of us as learners at one time or another. However, you may not be aware that it has a large basis of support in active learning research.
This post presents both a detailed example of how one UChicago instructor uses concept mapping and guidance on how you can use UChicago-supported technology to bring concept mapping to your class.
What is Concept Mapping?
Concept mapping asks students to arrange concepts spatially to represent their relationships, which can be particularly useful in the absence of a linear or causal relationship. In the influential book on active learning, Scientific Teaching, Handelsman et al. list the following reasons that students benefit from the work of reformatting material:
- In structuring their map, students arrange material in a way that makes sense to them individually
- In service of that mapping, students have to develop an understanding of the content (Handelsman 37)
The benefits of this practice have been extolled since it was first popularized at Cornell University in the 1970s, and many writers since have touted its usefulness in promoting higher order thinking skills and improved learning. It’s a versatile process that’s as useful for learning biological concepts as it is for designing user experiences in web design or laying out the scholarly conversation between course readings.
Whether you use pencil and paper, whiteboard and marker, or any of the virtual tools ATS can offer, you and your students can easily use this intuitive way to break up a complicated body of knowledge into smaller pieces to better understand it or gain a fresh perspective. Virtual whiteboard software like Zoom Whiteboards, Microsoft Whiteboard, and Box Canvas provides a large area to work, sticky notes, connectors, and various other structural and media tools to support your concept mapping. These tools also offer activity templates instructors can modify to serve their own purposes, as well as detailed collaboration settings.
Concept Mapping to Find Nuance
How is concept mapping being used at UChicago? Jennifer Spruill, co-chair of the Power, Identity, and Resistance sequence in the undergraduate Core, sat down with us to discuss how she uses concept mapping to guide students through dense texts that require especially attentive reading. This is true not only for prose that is hard to read, but–perhaps surprisingly–for texts that are so easy to read that a student may miss an important point that passes by quickly. While this has always been vital for scholarly reading, Marc Watkins recently noted that in the context of AI’s interference in learning, it is even more important that educators are “introducing friction” into the reading process to slow down and make sure students process what they are reading.
For example, in the Autumn Quarter of the sequence, Spruill explains that concept mapping helps to draw students’ attention to important points that are not signposted by the author, and which they might miss: “Rousseau’s texts are really dense and they’re also easy to read, much easier to read than the other texts we’ve read at that point, and when something’s easy to read, it’s easy to miss elements.”
Much like in other methods of close reading, like social annotation, the idea is to slow readers down, draw their attention to different nuances, and have them build understanding in a more active way. In that spirit, Spruill has students use the spatial, non-linear format of whiteboards to help draw comparisons between excerpts that may be separated by hundreds of pages and weeks of class. The strategy promotes understanding of the text as well as continuity of thinking in the midst of the busy quarter.
“In Fall, we’re really worried about helping students access and understand the argument in the text,” Spruill explains. “When I use it with Rousseau’s Social Contract, I choose quotations from that really dense text that help them move through the big points he makes. I ask them to do a map of the relations between these quotations, so they’re reading the quotations closely. They’re thinking about the basic ideas and their relation to each other.”
That idea of drawing attention to easy-to-miss elements of class reading speaks to a concern many instructors share about how much attention the nuances in their texts receive both in the specific online learning context and in general. Harvard Project Zero’s David Perkins describes this problem as the illusion of “completeness of perception.” (Perkins). Approaches like this can help remedy that haste to assume full understanding.
Concept Mapping to Manage Complexity
By contrast, Winter Quarter reading like Marx’s Capital may be overwhelming, with less room for an illusion of complete understanding. As such, students may benefit from guidance in managing the many terms and concepts that build on each other with increasing levels of abstraction.
“In Winter, I use concept mapping to help them consolidate their understanding of enormous and overwhelming texts. For Marx, I divide terms and create these categories of terms that work through the entire text. The groupings are more concrete terms, like commodity and wages, then more abstract terms, like concentration and cooperation, and the most abstract category, like negation, consciousness, and contradiction.”
The virtual whiteboard online allows Spruill to pre-arrange those terms and categories for her class, allowing them to focus on the work of manipulating those components of the text and better understand the ideas without being distracted by setup and technological barriers. She differentiates the groups spatially, with the color and shape options that allow the various elements to be easily distinguished.
Image shared with permission of Jennifer Spruill
“Concept mapping is really about helping students see the argument emerge from the text…By the end, they understand the text better as a whole. They understand hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages, and how they fit together.”
In the case of Capital, for example, Spruill notes that some of the more abstract terms (like “contradiction”), which the students don’t yet fully understand, are referenced early on in the text. Later on in the term, with the benefit of knowing the more concrete concepts (like “commodity”), students are able to revisit those references with a fuller understanding.
Image shared with permission of Jennifer Spruill
“I want students to see how these terms relate to each other, and how Marx’s argument emerges with relation to these different levels of abstraction because there are references early that they’re not really fully grasping that point.”
How to Plan Your Own Concept Mapping Activity
If you’d like to create your own concept mapping activity and are wondering where to start, there are a few questions or structures you can consider.
Firstly, you might think about lists and categories relevant to your material. As Spruill described, giving students components of those big ideas (or even text excerpts) to arrange in relation to one another can help them better understand those ideas.
You might also consider setting up the component parts of timelines or technical processes for students to interact with and manipulate.
- Timeline
- Processes
- Relationships
Structured Activities to Help You Explore Whiteboards and Concept Mapping
To create a first activity to get your students used to this way of interacting with your reading or concepts, you may find it useful to try thinking routines, structured activities that help to slow students down and get them to consider ideas more fully. Much like concept mapping as described above, these activities can be used with online whiteboards and ask students to interact with knowledge in a less linear way, generating and manipulating those useful lists and categories. Below, you can find a selection of such activities from Project Zero.
- Compass Points: This activity helps students to process new ideas or knowledge they’ve encountered and decide what to do next using four categories, Excitement; Worry; Needed Information; and current Stance.
- Generate-Sort-Connect-Elaborate: This activity gives the students a sequence of discrete activities to gather and organize their existing knowledge, which can help when it’s time to incorporate new concepts.
- Ways Things Can Be Complex – If you’re looking to take reactions to class material like reading to a deeper level or draw attention to more complexity than initially meets the eye for students, this structure may be of help. It also has potential for helping students as they form research questions, looking for complexity in several areas:
- Complexity of parts and interactions
- Complexity of truth
- Complexity over time
- Complexity of engagement
- Complexity of perspective
Tools that Can Support Concept Mapping
Virtual whiteboards are a great option for both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration or independent creation of concept maps. The following UChicago-supported tools provide a large canvas on which to share images and text, and even draw connections between ideas using arrows and lines.
- Zoom Whiteboards
- The main benefit of working in Zoom is that these boards can be shared for collaboration within a Zoom meeting without having to open a new window, much the same way screen sharing works.
- Microsoft Whiteboard
- Microsoft’s free tool offers the most extensive accessibility support for those who may need to use a screen reader to participate, including alt-text for images.
- Box Canvas
- Box, one of the file sharing services used at UChicago, offers a tool with functionality similar to the ones above, albeit with a slightly simplified toolbar. (Note that this tool is unrelated to Canvas, UChicago’s learning management system, but is a separate and similarly named tool owned by the company Box.)
(You may also be saying “Wait? Where’s Google Jamboard?” While Google’s tool for this task has long been very popular and is likely to be the one most users have heard of, it is being discontinued as of December 31, 2024.)
In Closing
Please keep watching our blog for more insights from our interview with Jennifer Spruill, including approaches like object-based learning and online chat activities. If you’re a UChicago instructor interested in sharing your innovative pedagogical approaches using technology, we’re interested in hearing about it! Email michaelhernandez@uchicago.edu.
For individual assistance, you can visit our office hours, book a consultation with an instructional designer, or email academictech@uchicago.edu. For a list of our upcoming ATS workshops, please visit our workshop schedule for events that fit your schedule.
