Map Drawing for Academic English by Young Ah

I would like to give my own observation from the class of the 13^th of April, titled by ‘Map of the World’ in Academic English Class. Everyone in the class was asked to draw the pictures of the map of the world. It was very interesting to see how our own cultural backgrounds actually affect to the pictures, reflecting each one’s uniqueness and lives. What I noticed from the observation is the three important main points.

Firstly, each person perceives based on his view about the country. Sometimes people exaggerated their own country. I saw one drawing where was extremely huge as Australian continent. For me, I drew Korea with small islands but I could not finish the Japan’s one. It can be interpreted as there is likely to happen that we have a different view of the same problem. For example, one government may not agree with an argument or does not take it seriously made by other government, because they see the one their own perspectives.

Secondly, we are living in the 21^st century when globalization becomes one of the important concepts for us. Especially, western culture has spread to the world widely. Even we are from all different country, almost everyone drew similar pictures. We put northern hemisphere up and East at the right. It was quite interesting to see our images of the world have already been decided by one of the cartographers. We do not use the one made by Chinese cartographer anymore, rarely using reversed maps, but use the established one by Ptolemy which includes Western Hemisphere bias.

Lastly, the environment also influences the perspectives of the world. Japan was existed in everyone’s drawings. That is because, now we are living in Japan so it became the relevant place for all of us.

Furthermore, people can learn and influence each other. After finishing our own observations, we had a chance to share these. Someone pointed out we missed the time line, the sea and some continents including North Pole. The other person wondered why we have only drawn the map in two dimensional since we were only asked to draw map, not the dimensional. It could be three-dimensional. I thought it was very good observation since I never imagined in that way. So second round, there was a slight change of the maps. People put more details which we missed from last one but learnt from others.

   In conclusion, I could see the reflection of our perspectives of the world from the maps that we drew. We are living in the modern world where ‘western’ is the major of the society. Also, each single person’s ranges of view can be very narrow and it usually begins from their country. However, the cognition of world can be restructured by interacting each other and changes of environments.

To be honest, I was wondering about the reason of doing this at first time. Now I understand it as I have been taking this class through few weeks so far. Even from this tiny thing, such as drawing pictures of the map, we understand these tiny things show us that who we are. Area study is not only about learning the world, but it is also the opportunities to know you with more understandings.

Kim Young Ah