Dr. Joel Thomas
Dr. Thomas, MBA, PMP, is a certified teacher in Math, Economics, English, and Human Geography with over several years of diverse international teaching experience from preschool-prison. He has taught 10 year old high school students how to crisis map and trained other teachers to host Mini- Mapathons. His passion for teaching Crisis Mapping is rooted in his experience teaching through The Tohoku Earthquake in Japan. Following the most expensive disaster in human history, he lead a coalition to do humanitarian relief work in the Tohoku disaster area and took an active part in the paradigm changing Sendai Framework. Crisis Mapping allows his students to co-create meaningful maps, collaborate with UNHCR, Doctors Without Borders, and Red Cross to complete service learning requirements. Dr. Thomas is bilingual and loves to travel visiting over 40 countries.
Sessions
This paper presents the learning outcomes of a Mini-Mapathon course developed, implemented, and evaluated for the first time in a population of 28 Asian Junior high school ELL students in three Human Geography courses at an international high school. The paper includes an introduction to crisis mapping and concludes with an analysis of students’ knowledge and skill gains, and attitudes towards map making. Students’ survey responses were analyzed using mixed methods. In conclusion, the paper proposes that the Mini-Mapathon course could be implemented in other schools with a larger sample size to investigate learning outcomes.