Imagine that you have 5 years to work with a group of students, in order to help them really grasp “the art and craft of being human”. You take a deep breath. You’re aware it’s a huge topic. One with countless facets. Where would you begin? How would you know what to cover? How might you allow for flexibility of content, without losing sight of your original goals?

These are some of the questions that our Human Technologies department have been grappling with over the past 10 years, as we’ve sought to design and refine a course that covers the big ideas, without being artificially narrow or overwhelmingly broad.

This dilemma might be compared to travelling through physical space, on a journey of adventure. When navigating daunting, unfamiliar or distant terrain, humans have long used maps in order to keep them safe and on track. Maps, produced by people who have traversed this ground before, allow us to pack the right resources, to forecast areas of difficulty, to plan ahead and to stay on track.

In this function,whilst a map might initially strike us as a primarily material technology, on reflection we come to see that it is also a cognitive technology - it changes our sense of the space we traverse. It 'domesticates' it, it 'lays claim' to it and it invokes a history…or else how was the map made? In short, it instructs us. In assuming this cognitive role, maps both add and take away from our experience. On the one hand, reassuringly, the map reminds us that we are not in 'uncharted territory', and so we feel bolstered by its presence; on the other, when marked by paths and roads, it “tells” us where to go, and so our freedom to wander can be hindered. As always when drawing on technologies, we’re making a bargain.

With this said, given the richness of mapping as a technology, it might come as no surprise to learn that when faced with an educational journey, educators tend to look to “curriculum mapping” as one solution. Adopting this approach we take the “curriculum landscape”, currently in the form of the 28 Human Tech units that teachers and students explore between Years 7 and 11, and plot out the key elements of the terrain. The significance of this work can be grasped when we consider that these 28 units take as their remit no less than the story of what it means to be human: how our minds work, how our characters develop, how we relate to the world and the other people we share it with, and how we might select, from an almost infinite choice, those technologies that allow us to live well. Clearly, in such a broad and varied setting, a map promises to be a useful technology to bring along.

To this end, our team has recently been working on an annual revision of the HT curriculum map, drawing together a small set of information on each unit:

• Unit name

• Brief description

• Order of teaching

• Keywords and concepts

• A link to the full unit outline

This information, originally collated in a Google Doc, is ultimately imported into Gibbon, where we can see a top-down view of the content that is covered, extracting out the main themes. From this vantage point we can look for deviations from our plan, spot areas of redundancy, and generally ensure that our classes spiral upwards through content that delivers the intended encounters, experiences and insights. In addition, by comparing our map to those created by other departments, we can spot areas for cross-curricular learning.

The cognitive and social technologies encompassed in curriculum mapping offers a great way to grasp something that can otherwise be quite elusive. The trick, like with so many technologies, is to not overuse it, nor to allow it to replace other forms of knowledge and judgement. In the case of mapping specifically, we might ask how we can retain an exploratory spirit within a mapped territory? How can we provide for changes in the landscape, or for newly emerging phenomena? What happens when the horizon shifts? How can we prevent ourselves from mistaking the map with the territory itself, a common hazard when adopting any model.

And so, as a matter of routine, we map…but always with a degree of trepidation and an eye for both novelty and the previously unnoticed, and in this sense we aim to practise what we teach: to develop a sensitivity to all the tools at our disposal, so that we can thoughtfully choose the right tools, at the right times, to get the job done well. That we use the tools, not the other way round.