Creative Tensions in Place-Conscious Learning: A Triptych

Abstract

This article was a keynote address delivered at the Curriculum for the
 Bioregion Conference on “Fostering an Ethic of Place,” February 7, 2015
 at the University of Puget Sound, in Tacoma, Washington. The Curriculum of
 the Bioregion Project, led by Jean MacGregor from The Evergreen State
 College, is a consortium of over thirty regional universities in the US and
 Canada that engages faculty communities in exploring the issues of
 sustainability and place-based learning in a broad array of courses and
 disciplines. This address aims to narrate a fluid theorization of place as
 curriculum that is responsive to the lived experience of everyday life. It
 draws on key moments of learning in the author’s biography and presents
 these learnings as three short stories. These stories try to convey and
 clarify how a theoretical construct such as place is lived as nuance and
 contradiction in everyday life, especially when we open to the experience of
 others, human and more-than-human. Fostering an ethic of place, the author
 suggests, depends on sensitivity to this nuance and the recognition of
 parallax.