Mapping a Terrain for Homeplace

Abstract

As Claudia Ruitenberg points out in her essay “Deconstructing the Experience of the Local: Toward a Radical Pedagogy of Place,” there has been considerable recent interest in place-based education (PBE). She frames PBE as emerging in response to the postmodern condition characterized by rootlessness, instability, displacement, anonymity, and physical and virtual mobility. The dominant perspective of PBE, according to Ruitenberg, is “rooted in phenomenology: it honors and inquires into the lived experiences of embodied beings in particular places and times.” While she admits that PBE may have positive effects — contextualizing knowledge and countering student alienation — she argues that its phenomenological stance puts it at risk of essentializing and sentimentalizing existing localities, relations, and identities; of “re-inscribing notions of innocence and purity” of place, of aiding and abetting “discourses that claim our true selves are inextricably bound up with our homeland or ‘native soil’.”