The Geography of Education and the Education of Geography: Agricultural Extension and the Political Ecology of Education

Abstract

The spatial nature of learning is increasingly a focus of geographic inquiry. I argue that the spatiality of education, which is where formal learning occurs, has the potential to shape students’ spatial imaginaries. I analyze the role the spatiality of agronomic education plays in the historical construction of the social and physical landscape in southeastern Pará, Brazil. In opposing ways, the first Green Revolution, and agrarian social movements’ more recent agroecological Green Revolution are found to structure agronomic education and spatial imaginaries. The perspectives of agricultural extension agents trained in traditional agronomic programs are compared with teachers from an agroecological school located in an Amazonian agrarian reform settlement of Brazil's Landless Workers’ Movement. I collected these data over 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork. To analyze these data, I employ a political ecology of education perspective, which highlights how education and political economy interact to mediate relations with, access to, and contestations over natural resources. The geography of education and the education of geography exist in a complicated feedback cycle: Education is not neutral but ideologically charged and affects conceptions of productive landscapes, providing students intellectual and economic power to put their visions of landscape into effect.