On Concept Mapping

Think back to the hands-on learning you might’ve had in elementary school. What was it about the pictures, shapes, colors, and physical actions involved in putting things together that made those connections so clear? Is it a coincidence that the foundational knowledge we acquire during those early years, so integral to the rest of life-long learning, is the result of making meaningful connections between concepts? How is it that we might lose those skills through our years of continued career and interest specialization? Literally playing with ideas, moving them around, connecting them, grouping and regrouping, and trying out new links, proves to be incredibly useful when conceptualizing sex education models, something I had the opportunity to try out in class this week.

With that in mind, the question we were asked revolved around some of the current ways people learn about sex in the United States? What are the relationships between religion, culture, family, privilege and environment for instance, and what do those things have to do with the way we learn about sex? By using the graphical representation of concept mapping, connecting concepts with other concepts through linking words to create meaningful statements, these complicated relationships are presented in a way that adds a physical/visual dimension to learning. In what direction do the arrows move when we’re thinking about individuals and how culture and biology influence how one experiences learning regarding sexuality? Concept mapping helps us understand these connections and allows us to place them in relation to other ideas like language, government, and media.

So, we have something that we’re trying to understand, how people experience learning with regard to sexuality for example. We then have these concepts, like family, privilege, culture, porn, and gender in relation to learning. We connect them with actions like ‘influence how we understand’ and ‘may consist of’ for example. However, if we have a concept like family, arranged hierarchically at the top of the concept map, linking all the way down to learning about gender roles, through school, media, and peers maybe, can the relationship be reciprocal so that these gender roles also influence the family and its structure, making the connection cyclical? That was the problem I was having with the two-dimensional method of concept mapping. HHHow can we link ideas that are at one bottom corner to ones at the top without a mess of lines that complicate the whole image?

With that in mind, I started to think about the map as more of a globe or sphere, literally like a globe of the earth. Using the shape of a sphere, we can connect back around, behind, over, and even through the space in the middle of a sphere, so that the interactions of these ideas are richer and more nuanced. I’m not a graphic designer by any means, so I wouldn’t know how to start a three-dimensional concept map. However, conceptualizing the process in a three-dimensional way feels like a way to get at the intersectionality that lies at the heart of people’s experiences, particularly around sexuality. It’s something I’ll have to think more about, especially when it comes to using concept mapping to help organize my thesis.