Participatory Community Mapping in a Family Literacy Program

Abstract

In this article, I describe and reflect on the lessons learned from developing and implementing an outreach project focusing on science education and participatory mapping with adult education students, primarily immigrants from northern Mexico. As a graduate student at the University of Arizona's Department of Anthropology, with support from a NASA Space Grant Fellowship, I developed and implemented this project between August 2004 and August 2006 in southern Arizona. Due to the demographics of this area, the majority of the students with whom I worked were immigrants from the Mexican state of Sonora, which borders Arizona (see Figure 1 below).