This article describes a community mapping project that urban-based teachers and teacher-candidates did as part of their graduate courses. New teachers are often strangers to the urban communities where their schools are located and often come from very different social and cultural backgrounds than the students they teach, which can cause missed opportunities to enrich student learning and teacher-student relationships. The teachers mapped literacy and arts resources in the neighborhoods surrounding their school communities in order to better understand where their students lived and to use these resources to inform their classroom instruction.