Landscapes and Learning: Place Studies for a Global World

Abstract

360 Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 21 No. 1 (2011) ISSN: 1546-2250 Landscapes and Learning: Place Studies for a Global World Somerville, Margaret and Power, Kerith and de Carteret, Phoenix (2009). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers; 227 pages. $29. ISBN 9460910815. The discipline of “place studies” arrived on my radar at exactly the right moment in my academic journey as an environmental teacher-educator committed to ecological and social justice. Landscapes and Learning: Place Studies for a Global World is a collection of papers that is situated as a “provocation to think ‘place’ differently” (3). The community of ideas assembled by the editors—Somerville, Power and de Carteret—is one that reflects the intention of the Transgressions: Cultural Studies and Education series of which this book is a part: to take up the potential of the intersections between cultural studies and education, “laying the groundwork for optimism, passionate commitment, and transformative educational and political activity” (ii). Indigenous peoples and knowledges, post-colonialism, class and gender, teacher education, situated knowledge—these are just a few of the research areas of the editors, a triumvirate of place studies theorists at Monash University in Australia. The groundwork of place studies is shaped by valuing and transmitting the pedagogical potential of landscape and cultural vernaculars, and recognizing the meaning-making generated by these local contexts as a key element of producing agency and citizenship in learners. Modern education strives to achieve placelessness—an ahistorical and monolithic version of knowledge in the name of progress and economic gain (for some), at great cost to humans and to places. The writers of the papers in this collection respond with possibility and hope, exposing the potential of place and of local communities to resist, and to revalue local literacies and the complexities of their historical, social, political and ecological capital. “Through place it is possible to understand the embodied effects of the global at the local level” (6). Somerville, partly in response to place-theorist Gruenewald’s conception of a critical pedagogy of place having the twin goals of decolonization and reinhabitation (2003), proffers an evolution of this concept with three key elements: “our relationship to place is constituted in stories and other representations; place learning is local and embodied, and deep place learning occurs in a contact zone of contestation” (8). Somerville’s three elements are a leitmotif within the papers in this book. The description of the Transgressions series outlines the intended audience: “teachers, teacher educators, scholars and students of cultural studies and others interested in cultural studies and pedagogy” (ii). Each paper in the volume emphasizes the importance of complexity, of multiple and divergent views; this is taken up in several papers by invoking the rhizomatic thinking of 361 Deleuze and Guattari, Steinberg’s bricolage (2006) and “a constellation of processes” (Kenway 204). While there is an exciting and engaging range of disciplinary contexts in this book, a couple of the papers, in particular Carter’s “Care at a Distance,” are dense with language and discourse that would appeal most to the committed academic. These papers are interspersed with others that have a more narrative or personal voice. I especially valued the emphasis on indigenous perspectives and knowledge expressed by Paton and Brearly, Rennie, and Somerville. Colonization is also a dominant theme throughout the papers. In the introduction, which is strong and engaging, the editors point out that each of the contributors situate themselves in relation to “the two major waves of globalization,” i.e., 18th century colonization and “the current wave of economic, cyber, and environmental globalization” (11); they explore the expression of these oppressions within the education system and the forms of knowledge and identity that are privileged within education and governance structures. Schlunke takes up colonization/colonialism in the contested place story of Possession Island. Appleby explores English literacy education as colonizer in the context of globalization education. Kenway emphasizes the importance of the interrelationship between the local and the global, as we all exist in both local and global contexts. Readers will be particularly interested in the rich, creative, place-connective practices for children and youth articulated in several of the papers. Hickey-Moody writes of the creative significance of the...