Conference Program

Ecological crises are increasingly understood as being shaped by dominant narratives about nature, territory, and human-environment relationships. These narratives are not only articulated through discourse but also embedded in representational practices that influence how environments are perceived, documented, and taught in educational contexts. Among these practices, maps occupy a particularly powerful position: historically associated with processes of territorial control, abstraction, and colonial ordering (MacDonald, 2024), cartographic representations have contributed to producing authoritative ways of seeing and organising space (Hirt, 2022).
Within educational settings, maps are often introduced primarily as technical instruments for orientation and spatial accuracy. Such uses may inadvertently reproduce a detached and objectifying relation to environments, positioning learners as observers of static spaces to be decoded, measured, and mastered. In response to these concerns, this contribution proposes a theoretical and methodological reflection on mapping practices in ecological and outdoor education, drawing on insights from critical cartography, children’s geographies, and participatory research (Lanouette et al., 2024).
The contribution argues that maps can be reinterpreted as documentation devices capable of capturing situated experiences of place. When mapping is approached as a process rather than as the production of a correct representation, maps become personal narrative artefacts that document how environments are encountered, remembered, and interpreted through lived experience. In outdoor and place-based educational contexts, maps produced by children and young people often integrate spatial references with memories, emotions, encounters with human and more-than-human beings, and questions emerging from exploration (Somerville, 2013). From this perspective, mapping becomes a way of documenting not only spatial elements but also the relational and affective dimensions of ecological learning.
This shift opens a connection with counter-mapping traditions (Ingold, 2011) that challenge dominant cartographic imaginaries by foregrounding alternative perspectives and situated knowledges. While counter-mapping has often been associated with indigenous, activist, and community-based practices, similar principles can inform educational contexts in which learners are invited to produce their own maps of places they inhabit and explore. In these situations, mapping can function as a pedagogical practice that makes visible the plurality of ways in which environments are experienced and interpreted.
The contribution also reflects on the role of educators in facilitating such practices. When maps are treated as open-ended documentation processes rather than evaluative products, they can support plural interpretations of place and challenge adult-centred epistemic hierarchies. This creates space for children’s perspectives to emerge as meaningful forms of knowing, while recognising their agency (Clark, 2011) in interpreting and narrating relationships with local ecologies.
By framing maps as documentation tools within a counter-mapping perspective, this contribution suggests that mapping practices in ecological education can help deconstruct dominant spatial imaginaries and foster more relational ways of understanding different environments.