Visualizing The National Parks - Celebrating 100 Years Of America's Wonder

Source: National Geographic

On August 25, 2016, the National Park Service (NPS) turns 100. After a century of shepherding America's splendor, the Park Service and its personnel will rightfully be feted as dedicated, humble stewards of our country's most precious landscapes.

Personally, we have been lucky enough to visit many of the nation's 59 parks on all points of the compass. Each site has never failed to live up to its consecration as a place of American rarity, pride, and beauty. From the unspoiled trails to the popular overlooks, every curated destination within the wilderness is a testament to the work and vision of the Parks Service.

Source: National Park Service

This august anniversary introduces many opportunities to weave the Parks into authentic classroom lessons. For example, the "Every Kid In A Park" initiative seeks to connect our nation's youth to its most treasured spaces. Additionally, a wide range of visualizations now provide easy ways to incorporate the centennial into state standards and skill-based curricula. At their least, these videos and graphics offer terrific kick-offs to a morning's discussion. At their best, these charts and illustrations support critical student proficiencies. They also bring to life the gorgeous panoply of natural wonder that would make any Disney confection blush.



To start, the "Find Your Park" website gathers videos and social media interactions of everyday first-person testimonials about the grandeur of America's vistas. As a companion, the NPS has opened its Geographic Information Systems (GIS) data to the public, for educators and graphic artists to tap in building models of terrains and visitations.

Some of the best renderings of the National Parks come from the Works Project Administration during the 1930s New Deal. These art deco posters from the Federal Arts Project capture the majesty of the otherworldly settings in colorful and appealing travel enticements. National Geographic has assembled a nice collection of these posters from the Library Of Congress.

Source: National Park Service

In a video homage, the outdoor outfitter O.A.R.S. has put together a stunning tribute to the Parks, told through the stirring words of Theodore Roosevelt. As befitting its founder, the NPS takes seriously its safeguarding of America's geology. It invites students of energy, minerals, and paleontology to explore the singular contours and cliffs through open online access and badging of restoration and geoscience. These resources are terrific for earth science and environmentally minded teachers to investigate with their students.

Source: FiveThirtyEight

In math and statistics, the minds at FiveThirtyEight (who usually spend their time worrying about political polls and baseball ERAs) have analyzed the popularity of each park. They crafted crisp graphs and charts for STEM educators to draw from in ranking the visitors to each venerated location. As they note, "the U.S. national parks have never been so popular," and the Great Smoky Mountains continues its reign as the most-visited National Park, due to its location and exquisiteness.

Source: FiveThirtyEight

In probing the specifics beneath the Great Smoky Mountains' charm, researcher John Farrell raked the Instagram API to determine where in the Park photographs were most frequently snapped. His visualization layers social media atop traditional coordinate geography to present a new picture of the Park's usage. He includes similar map mash-ups for other coast-to-coast sites.

Source: John Farrell

For its part, the NPS has put together its own retro advertisement, in the classic style of antique movie reels or 1950s television ads. This wry film is a perfect nod to the 100-year heritage of the organization. It also displays a warm embrace of every citizen who passes through the Parks' gates.



Digging deeper into the soil and flora, Luke Easterwood, Michael Gelon, Hadar Scharff, and Matt Soave have analyzed the Parks' Vegetation Inventory. They built a visualization series to "encourage insightful discoveries" through the Tableau interface. These charts and graphs drill down to specific physiognomic classes and leaf phenology details.

Source: mattsoave.com

In order to help navigate the Parks, the Sierra Club has designed a System Map based on the urban subway template. This seemingly humorous rendering actually gives travelers a valuable guide in planning their vacations and in connecting the dots between regional marvels.

Source: Fast Company

Source: David Hockney

Finally, the purest representations of America's National Parks have always come from the minds of the country's painters. Beginning with the light portraits of Thomas Moran, many artists have sought to capture the glory of glaciers and geysers. Most recently, David Hockney scratched a series of brilliant sweeps on his iPad in his "Yosemite Suite." These personal, stylized views prove to any viewer that the nation's Parks are love letters to its wilderness. They are the last vestige against urbanity and a hallmark of global distinction.

April Fool’s Day – A Little Bit Of History

Source: History Channel

With cabin fever at an all time high in our students from what seems to be the never-ending chilly weather, we fully expect to get our fair share of practical jokes today on April Fool’s Day. We will no doubt try a few pranks ourselves on them as well.

But, as history teachers, we inevitably look for ways to give them a little bit of history about the day. The "Ask History: April Fools" video produced by the History Channel has the answers to how practical jokes became associated with April 1, complete with a little prank at the end.



For a little April Fool’s Day math, check out this graphic from Forbes on who is most likely to get fooled. By all accounts from the Harris poll survey, bosses are safe. We wonder if that will pan out for teachers, too. It might be a good opportunity to poll the students electronically using Kahoot to see whom they would put on their lists.

Source: Forbes

We hope our readers have a fun-filled day. There's no April Fools in that!

Charts, Graphs, And Visual STEAM - Teaching The Super Bowl By The Numbers

Source: Asbury Park Press

Aside from the physical drama and the halftime theatrics, the Super Bowl provides prime fodder for data analytics. The enormous volume of communication and marketing around this shared cultural moment offers a case study for exploring numbers and significance.

These days, graphs are no longer the sole purview of math class. This fall, for example, we spent a “math week” in social studies talking about how historians incorporate statistics and charts in probing the details behind pivotal events. Similarly, the Super Bowl bridges academic disciplines as an appealing touchstone for students to get excited about analytical reasoning and data design. That’s how right-brained and left-brained mindsets can merge perfectly in a contemporary STEAM study.

Some examples of lessons and visual aids that use graphs and charts include:

• Is There A Visual Thinking App? Charts, Graphs, & The 1:1 Classroom
• The School Of Big Data - Choosing The Right Graph
• I Love Charts - Discovering Stories Hidden In Numbers
• A Taxonomy Of Graphs

Source: Yellowfin

On Super Bowl Sunday, 1.25 billion chicken wings are expected to be consumed. The number of tweets is predicted to top 25 million, up significantly from the 13.4 million last year. And the average American is projected to consume 2,400 calories of Super Bowl chow.

The emphasis here is on the visual presentation of numerical sets. Graphic literacy (or “graphicacy”) means that learners can “read” the grammar of lines and bars. Understanding trends and anomalies are key skills in interpreting mathematical and scientific figures.

As every educational institution searches for ways to blend STEAM proficiencies into the curriculum, the pop draw of the Super Bowl can be just the ticket to grab kids’ attentions in discovering the day’s dynamic details. Any of the tables or diagrams below would be terrific examples to show on Monday in kicking off a week of visual STEAM activities. The logical reasoning of numbers meets the illustrative narrative of the liberal arts:

Source: The New York Times

Super Bowl ads often get the most attention from both football diehards and passing revelers alike. This interactive tool from the New York Times allows students to compare a timeline of percentages as they parse the media blitz across the years.

Source: Yellowfin

The media literacy component of Super Bowl mayhem cannot be overlooked. Many avenues exist for teachers to guide students in realizing the emotional tug of advertising during this high profile event. Yellowfin has designed an easily understood graph of Super Bowl ad prices to engage any student.

Source: Yellowfin

For aficionados of the sport itself, Yellowfin has assembled a horizontal bar chart of MVP winners by position. The results are familiar enough to let the content drive the comprehension. In other words, even the youngest mathematicians can expect QBs to win awards, and thus the extended blue bar becomes a visual signifier for their predictions. 

Source: Yellowfin

For strategists of team offenses, bubble graphs can blend with traditional tables to illuminate the choices of quarterbacks in certain situations.

For other Super Bowl educational resources, we recommend these posts:

• Teaching The Super Bowl: Social Media Literacy
• The Other Super Bowl Commercials And The Power Of Student Voice

Graphicacy - The Key To Visual Thinking In A Differentiated Classroom

In the scholastic world's quest to pinpoint new "literacies," one of the most essential skills in a student's toolkit isn't new at all. "Graphicacy" is the vital proficiency with visual inputs that all learners must master in the modern classroom. Graphicacy refers to the encoding and decoding of images, particularly in the close examination of details that construct visual meaning. It stands with literacy, oracy, and numeracy as one of the four indispensable corners of education.

Source: Christopher G. Healey

Graphicacy dates to W.G.V. Balchin's coinage of the term in the 1960s to identify the visual-spatial aspect of human intelligence. What began as a staple of South African geography education has ballooned in importance thanks to the onslaught of learning and entertainment media that all rely on optical displays. Especially in today's 1:1 classroom, with hand-held devices and ubiquitous smartphones, the understanding of visual patterns and pictorial cognition is imperative.

Graphicacy is about more than visual thinking. It is instead a careful roster of skills to comprehend diagrams, photographs, charts, logos, icons, maps, and picture books. With today's rightful emphasis on differentiated instruction, contemporary classrooms need to incorporate coaching in graphicacy to reach students via their learning preferences.

Source: Stephen Few

One key to guiding students in understanding graphs and drawings is teaching them about preattentive attributes. These are the visual marks that the mind's iconic perception unconsciously absorbs. Preattentive attributes are quickly discerned by the eye and rationalized by the brain to distinguish size, shape, color, and alignment. Visual designers employ preattentive attributes to make tables readable and logos memorable.

Stephen Few offers a clean, expert tutelage in the keys of preattentive attributes in "Tapping The Power Of Visual Perception." His graphic (above) presents some of the core distinguishing techniques used in both creating and interpreting images.

Source: Creative Bloq, via Alberto Cairo, The Functional Art

Another valuable graphic (above), which combines single attributes into coordinated displays, is featured in Graham Odds excellent explanation, "How To Design Better Data Visualizations," at the Creative Bloq. Taken from the work of William Cleveland and Robert McGill and published in Alberto Cairo's book, The Functional Art, this illustration is terrific for teachers to use as a tool in laying out the building blocks of visual comparisons. Students can apply the techniques of the optical continuum to decipher political cartoons, historical maps, and scientific displays. Dustin Smith also highlights the value of this graphical instruction at his superb blog.

To catch students' attentions and open their eyes to the power of subtle attributes, we recommend Jason Silva's masterful video, "To Understand Is To Perceive Patterns." In zippy, dynamic narration, Silva races through a visual blitz of naturally occurring frameworks and motifs. It's fascinating and mind-boggling for any viewer.

For further information about graphicacy, we suggest:

• Graphicacy = Visual Literacy + Visual Thinking 
• Graphicacy And Teaching The Art Of Seeing 
• Graphicacy: Infographics As Literacy
• Graphicacy: Deciphering The Code
• Graphicacy: The Neglected Fourth "R"
• Graphicacy In The Primary Grades
• Graphicacy: 4 Steps To Understanding An Image

Is There A Visual Thinking App? Charts, Graphs, & The 1:1 Classroom

Source: Online-Behavior

With the advent of the iPad generation, the skills of graphicacy are taking on more importance than ever in today's classrooms. Graphicacy is the learned ability to decipher and design images, particularly around symbols, charts, and coded meanings.

Amid the national emphasis on STEM programs, charts are becoming key tools to represent visual statistics. As more and more schools migrate to 1:1 tablets, therefore, students need a foundation in reading and rendering their own optic inputs.

Source: Online-Behavior

The language of apps today is printed in icons. On handheld devices, colorful squares dance across each swiped screen. Children need to recognize these badges and identify the relationships between the logos and the corresponding actions.

With all of the nimble iPad tools, students can now efficiently create charts and graphs that represent data. In math and science classes, young learners can manipulate lines and layouts to share their findings. Historians and artists can incorporate visual blueprints for the Web 3.0 educational world.

Our own school has been implementing a 1:1 iPad program this year. We've been layering in graphs to help children understand antebellum agriculture and industrial GDP. For helpful posts about teaching with graphs, we recommend the following:

• The School Of Big Data - Choosing The Right Graph
• A Controversy Of Graphic Proportions
• A Taxonomy Of Graphs
• I Love Charts - Discovering Stories Hidden In Numbers
• Graphicacy: 4 Steps To Understanding An Image

A terrific infographic that lays out traditional chart types in a kid-friendly, colorful fashion is "Nuts And Bolts Of Chart Types" from Online-Behavior. Familiar diagrams like the pie chart and line graph are explained in simple language. More sophisticated plots like the waterfall and radar charts also receive lucid billing.

The tree graph, in particular, has become wildly popular in the business world to represent customer segmentations. Recent budget graphics and current event maps have also relied on the tree graph to chunk related information.

Source: Lo's List, David McCandless, Harper Collins, The Visual Miscellaneum

New categories, however, are emerging to display contemporary data. Tropes from the digital dictionary are now readily recognizable as ways to present visual information. The concept map, matrix grid, flow chart, word cloud, and bubble graph are all now popular tools.

The terrific handout, "Types Of Information Visualization," offers these emerging illustrations in a valuable grid. Presented via Lo Martin, from her interview with graphic guru David McCandless, this table from The Visual Miscellaneum draws on Edward Tufte's work to present visual arrangements for iPad enthusiasts.

We owe a lot to our friend Lam Thuy Vo, the journalist, infographic guru, and interactive media editor at Al Jazeera America, who introduced us to the McCandless framework and who also created the superb diagnosis below of the "Anatomy Of A Chart." It is a first-rate primer for learners of any age as they begin to decode data representations.

Source: Lam Thuy Vo

For other articles on teaching with charts, please see:

• Storytelling With Data - Telling Multiple Stories
• A Beginner's Guide To Charting Data
• Keeping Up With... Visual Literacy

Visual Resources To Teach About The U.S. Government Shutdown

Source: International Business Times
(click for detail)

The shutdown of the United States government began today. With no plan of action from either political party, there is consequently no easy lesson for teachers to share with their students.

Any discussion of the current Congressional stalemate naturally begins with a civics lesson about political parties and the separation of powers. The questions today from our students, however, quickly centered on issues of blame and health care.

Fortunately, a collection of visual resources from various media outlets do exist to help children learn about the overarching meaning of a shutdown, as well as more granular details about federal budgets and opinion polls.

A good place to start is the short video from the BBC, entitled "US Government Shutdown In 60 Seconds." The clip addresses questions that might be worrying children, such as whether the pandas in the National Zoo will be fed (yes).



Another key interactive tool is the "US Government Shutdown" visualization from Michael Bauer at School Of Data. By rolling over variously sized color bars, the pop-up box provides figures about how each federal agency will be affected.

Source: School Of Data

Bauer's interface is similar to the helpful infographic from The New York Times, entitled "Who Goes To Work? Who Stays Home?"

Source: The New York Times (click for detail)

To explore how individual citizens will be impacted by the shuttering of departments, have the students explore the infographic from the International Business Times, entitled "How Would A Government Shutdown Affect Your Life?" Or take a look at the slide show from USA Today that catalogs the "Government Shutdown By The Numbers."

Source: USA Today

If students ask questions about which party is to blame, or about how the American people will react, take a look at the graph of a Rasmussen poll that asks, "Would A Government Shutdown Be..."

Source: MyGovCost.org

You could also share the results that found a "Majority Want No Shutdown."

Source: National Journal

If you are searching for historical information about past government closures, the bar graph from Seth Kadish at Vizual Statistix documents the anomalous nature of our current predicament.

Source: Vizual Statistix

For a road map to the current termination, the graphic designers at The New York Times have once again put together a clear and illuminating flowchart of Congressional actions.

Source: The New York Times (click for detail)

Finally, if your students are having a hard time understanding the basic nature of the federal budget, try incorporating the interactive chart from the New York Times that details every 2012 proposed expenditure. It is posted on a terrific list of graphs via Poynter, entitled "As Government Shutdown Looms, 5 Interactives Explain The Budget Battle."

Source: The New York Times; Poynter

Are Today's Students Afraid Of Intellectual Risk?

Source: ASIDE 2013

An increasing refrain from various rungs of the educational ladder is that students are scared to take intellectual risks. Teachers note that pupils are reluctant to guess, to stretch themselves, or to experiment. Perhaps it's a consequence of the "praised" generation, when kids receive trophies for participation and adults shield adolescents from failure. By protecting them from disappointment, however, well-intentioned parents end up insulating children from the experience of trial-and-error. By differentiating just-right reading groups, well-meaning elementary schools end up barring learners from grappling with concepts or language.

Naomi Wolf lamented in The Guardian that "children raised this way are often very nice; but they are notably passive and indecisive." It's no wonder that entrepreneur fairs and maker spaces are sprouting up in schools. Institutions are now forced to "teach" what used to be called "growing up." The joy of tinkering, creating, and imagining have become sources of angst for a generation of safe learners.

Source: ASIDE 2013

The concern is that this hesitancy in intellectual risk will result in hesitancy in life. We've put together the diagram above to graph some of the issues we're wresting with in guiding our students. The different spectra on the "x" and "y" axes represent the different ways people respond to uncertainty and action. Hopefully, by making the dangers of standstill explicit, educators and parents can nudge their kids toward the development of opinions. They can learn to enjoy a cognitive gamble.

Educational

(click for larger version)

The classroom should be the incubator of ideas. In a safe learning environment, students can cultivate their own voices. They can wonder. They can make conjectures about cause-and-effect, and they can test hypotheses about future events. One of the glaring symptoms of youthful reluctance is a student's shrug when invited to express a point of view. There is nothing more dispiriting for a teacher when she asks, "Who is your favorite president?" and the child responds, "I don't know." Or when a teacher welcomes a student to draw a picture, and the child anxiously confesses, "I don't know what to draw." The worst-case scenario is that this nervousness about trying something new will lead to resistance to exciting opportunities or retreat from difficult situations.

Professional

If children rely on parents or teachers to tell them what to draw or to instruct them in every action, they enter their later years with a motivational delay. They aren't used to reaching their own goals, and this lack of initiative sets up lives without intent. Sometimes the most fulfilling life achievements demand taking chances. Becoming an astronaut or writing a blog requires a certain training and a degree of confidence. Young people who are diffident in aspiration don't leave school equipped with the tools to make plans.

Personal

Personal risks seem the least obvious but are actually the most crucial of life's ventures. If students are uncomfortable expressing themselves, how will they stand up for their own beliefs? How will they step outside of themselves and intervene on behalf of others? Outreach is the cure to being a bystander, but teenagers panicky about self-assertion may remain forever insular. If we want our children to be good citizens and defend their values, we need to nurture their self-confidence from the youngest ages.

All of these worries about taking chances remind us of the video called "Growing Up." Created by by Jorge R. Canedo Estrada, Kasey Lum, Marisa Tores, and Alexander Badr, this award-winning clip uses lively visuals to show that the world is not so scary after all. There's lots of excitement to look forward to, and we can help children take the step forward.


Growing Up from Jr.canest on Vimeo.

The School Of Big Data - Choosing The Right Graph

Big Data Analytics - Choosing the Right Chart for Your Data from Datameer on Vimeo.

We've enjoyed incorporating charts and graphs into our weekly lessons. The best thing about data displays is that they evoke numerical stories within any discipline, whether science, math, economics, history, or humanities. Understanding a graph is an essential skill. Creating an original chart, however, is a higher-level exercise. It is the difference between decoding a political cartoon and creating an original drawing. It's the difference between reading an essay and writing an essay.

The clear, detailed video from Datameer (above) lays out six essential types of charts and gives numerous examples of their potential applications. Even though Datameer is a data management company, the engaging video is ideal for teachers and learners. The clip offers a step-by-step primer about the range of visual options for all sets of numbers and statistics.

Source: Extreme Presentation

The ever-expanding world of "Big Data" means that our students must emerge from high school with a deft familiarity in numbers and analytics. To read more about how databases and statistics are shaping the field of education, you might check out the following:

• Education In The Age Of Big Data
• The Bigfoot Of Big Data - Educational Myth vs. Reality
• The Goldilocks Effect - Visualizing Just The Right Amount

A useful site to use in the classroom is the Chart Chooser from Juice Analytics. The roster of resources gives targeted tools for all sorts of data goals. It pairs well with the Chart Chooser diagram from Extreme Presentation. The handy graphic provides an instructional flowchart to select the best chart or graph for a range of desired outcomes.

Source: Juice Analytics

Accurate graphs can enhance classroom conversations about current trends or data sciences. Poorly constructed charts, however, can distort meanings and impart imprecise interpretations. The reliability of graphs, in fact, became a debate point in the 2012 presidential election. 

For further reading about creating graphs, we recommend:

• How To Construct Bad Charts And Graphs
• Data: Using Graphs And Visual Data
• The Extreme Presentation Method

For eye-opening examples of "bad" charts, we recommend:

• Junk Charts
• Mistaken Data, from Flowing Data
• Inaccurate Graphs, from EvalBlog

I Love Charts - Discovering Stories Hidden In Numbers

Source: 8th Grade Student, ASIDE

This week, we are teaching our students how to create charts. On a higher level, we are also helping them realize the benefits of graphs in discovering stories hidden within data and in demonstrating opinions through visualizations.

Guiding kids to decode illustrated data can result in a life-long skill, vital for their future budgets and 401ks. But freeing them to make graphs on their own can also unlock the perceived mysteries behind scientific displays. Whether digital or paper-based, student-designed charts can be great cross-curricular tie-ins between social studies and math, good for any grade level. Elementary learners can create pie graphs to show fractions. Middle school algebraists can practice their slopes and x/y intercepts. High school economists can plot variable cost curves and production possibility frontiers.

In teaching about primary source data and Excel models, we like to incorporate the "Taxonomy Of Graphs" as a visual guide to the different types of displays, from the literal to the abstract. We also like to let children explore the many online sites for quick graphic generation.



A terrific video to make kids smile and introduce the broad world of graphs comes from Sid The Science Kid on PBS Kids. The catchy musical clip, entitled "I Love Charts," has been shared by several sites thanks to its catchy jingle and educational value.

Source: 8th Grade Student, ASIDE

As an example of an in-class lesson, we did a quick one-day exercise with our eighth-graders to explore the regional changes in agriculture and farming after the Civil War. Using data from the PBS American Experience site, "Reconstruction: The Second Civil War," our students produced graphs of each state to reveal transformations in the number and value of both land and manufactured goods. Even while cataloging numbers and formatting line graphs, the students were thoroughly engaged, tweaking their layouts and choosing colors and designs. They also added hyperlinks to their images so classmates could click directly to the source.

Source: History Tech, 8th Grade Student, ASIDE

Another trouble-free lesson in chart creation comes from Glenn at History Tech. We followed the excellent suggestions in his blog post and invited our students to debate in small groups the relative weight of three Civil War causes. They discussed for several minutes and then made simple pie graphs on the free online tool Pie Color. Finally, each team displayed their graph on the SMARTboard, justifying their percentages to the rest of the class.

Some of our favorite sources for statistical data to use with students include:

• The 2012 Statistical Abstract
• Fact Monster
• The Top 50 Statistics Blogs
• The Old Farmer's Almanac

The Axis Of Education - Changing The Teaching Matrix

Source: ASIDE

Is creativity an end, or a means to an end? In education, this question has no easy answer. At times, creativity serves as a vehicle for inspiration, while at other times, originality is the destination itself. For painters and poets, artistry is the conduit to new perspectives and phrases. For the basement tinkerer, innovation is the spark to invention. But schools do not produce inventions; they produce inventors. For this reason, to incubate the creative mind is a crucial role of the teacher. To foster imagination is a key pathway toward entrepreneurship and discovery. Ingenuity, therefore, resides in the upper quadrant of any educational schema.

(Click for a full-size version)

As teachers, we are in the process of putting together our goals for the new school year. At the top of our list is finding ways to nurture creativity in our students. We sketched out an "Axis Of Education" as a matrix to guide our development of lessons and activities. This coordinate system lays out the two variables of what we teach and how we teach, seeking an escalating ideal of skills and self-discovery. Since we try to guide our students in reading charts and graphs, it made sense to visualize our own objectives via an x/y axis.

The four quadrants within the matrix represent different teaching models, none necessarily better or worse than the other, but each distinct in the proficiencies it elicits in the student and in the roles it envisions for the educator. In the bottom left is the traditional classroom that relies on "ritual recitation," with a teacher at the front of the room and a host of facts to memorize. As the y-axis branches upward, the teacher is still in command, aiming for higher-order skills but maintaining a fixed, "one-size fits all" approach. Along the x-axis, the skills remain basic while the students enjoy freedom without guidance, risking a stabbing-in-the-dark, "pin the tail on the donkey" method. Ultimately, the upper right quadrant cultivates hands-on experimenters. By emphasizing original ideas in an entrepreneurial classroom, teachers create a laboratory of "experiential design," where children try and fail in the security of self-confident investigation.

In this blueprint, destructive teaching does exist. Heading in the negative direction are worksheets and scripts that might enforce rote facts but that undermine any expertise of the profession. Similarly, rushed units of study may result from good intentions, but the rapid pace and incomplete reflection time do more harm than good. Finally, standardized testing does the most damage. Not only does it vitiate every virtue of a teacher's training and passion, but it also chokes creativity and genuine learning.

If you would like a .pdf version of the "Axis Of Education" graphic, please click here.

A Controversy Of Graphic Proportions

We use a lot of charts and graphs in our classes, to assess the changing world and to develop skills of visual analysis. Teaching children to decode, create, and apply data visualizations can foster some of the most valuable skills they will need for future use. Our middle-schoolers, for example, use census data to compare pre- and post-Civil War production in farming and manufacturing.

Source: ASIDE

In the past, they have also graphed exports of colonial raw materials and increases in 1800s industrial goods. The NCES Kids Zone and the U.S. Census for Kids both contain terrific resources for elementary and middle school students. On their websites, users can instantly generate graphs with colorful, interactive tools. One of our other favorite sources of facts and figures is the six-volume Almanac of American Life, which covers virtually every statistical topic of United States history.

Newspapers and magazine rely on graphs to depict current news stories, and political candidates often offer charts to buttress their positions. Republican hopeful Mitt Romney, for example, recently faced media scrutiny over a key graph in his jobs plan. Some commentators complained that the graph was intentionally misleading in assigning blame for the recent recession. A careful examination of the text within the image and within the supporting paragraphs, however, does accurately explain the representation, but an observer needs a honed critical lens to parse the graph properly.

Source: Romney for President

Another primary contender, Michele Bachmann, prominently used charts in a January televised speech rebutting the president's State of the Union address. She, too, received criticism over selective use of data, leading to a virtual graph war over which was the most truthful economic depiction.

The most renowned and effective political wielder of statistical charts, of course, was 1992 independent candidate Ross Perot. His intensive use of graphs during his paid television segments convincingly made the case for deficit reduction and spending changes. It was a far cry from the typical bluster and voice-overs of most campaign ads, and for 18.9% of voters, it was a welcome change.

Source: YouTube

Legendary NBC newsman Tim Russert also famously used simple whiteboard numbers to explain the complexity of the Electoral College during the 2000 presidential race. His straightforward eloquence and genuine decency made his one of the most respected voices in political punditry.

Check out our other posts about design and education in the 2012 election.