Journey Mapping as Pedagogy: Teaching Social Mobility through Mapping Methodology

• In Event: Innovative Teaching Practices: Part 2

Abstract

In this presentation, I offer journey mapping as a critical qualitative methodology and pedagogical tool for students to connect their life experiences to their beliefs about educational success, mobility, and overarching power structures. I engage students by guiding them through the construction of their own maps on their own pathways into higher education (constructed with pen and paper or digital medium) creating their own case study to analyze in a longer extended writing assignment. Ultimately, students reflect both individually and as a group on their own experiences and the structural and institutional factors that sustain or facilitate educational access and construct their own theories of social mobility. This presentation offers visual and theoretical presentations of journey mapping (examples pulled from my own student’s coursework in a class on social mobility, and applications from authors Annamma 2018 and Marx et al. 2023).

Author

• Summer L. Lopez Colorado, University of California-Los Angeles