Deconstructing the Experience of the Local: Toward a Radical Pedagogy of Place

Abstract

More than a decade ago, David Orr wrote that “other than as a collection of buildings where learning is supposed to occur, place has no particular standing in contemporary education.” Michael Peters agreed that “modern educational theory has all but ignored questions of space, of geography, of architecture.” Under the influence of a “renaissance” of space in social theory, however, space and place are no longer absent from educational theory, nor, increasingly, from educational practice. With the deconstruction of the mind/body binary, the precedence of temporality over spatiality has waned; the embodied mind undeniably exists in space as well as time. “Space is now more and more seen as having been under-theorised and marginalised in relation to the modernist emphasis on time and history” (PSB, 41). But with increased physical and virtual mobility, the concept of “space” itself has been reconfigured. Concepts such as cyberspace, nomadism, and hybridity have been introduced, and — to draw on the influential metaphor of the network — emphasis has shifted from the stable nodes (places) in the network to the vectors (flows) between shifting nodes.