Pedagogy Of Place Research Articles

Situatedness and distanciation: Education in a time of ecological crisis and climate crisis

Abstract In this paper, I explore the significance of place in education. The historical context is expressed by the ecological and climate crises in a world distinguished by the unjust distribution of privileges and burdens. I elucidate the concept of place by entering the tradition of the pedagogy of place. Here, the significance of place is accentuated with a sensitivity to the local context, in contrast to other educational approaches that emphasize more generic, abstract knowledge. A central premise is the notion of place as a delimited unit that is distinguished from other places. This stable notion, I argue, needs to be reconsidered in the present. With reference to Massey, I accentuate relations as pivotal to a notion of place that accommodates both a sense of belonging and conflicts of power and interest. I hold that education at this time in history should be sensitive to our situatedness in everyday life’s web of relationships. Still, general knowledge is required to bring up perspectives that enable students to critically conceive the place in which they are situated. I make and discuss these claims with reference to and in critique of Young’s notion of powerful knowledge and Klafki’s reformulation of German Didaktik. A central concern is to clarify the mediation of situated knowledge and general knowledge in educational practice. In the final part of the paper, I bring in elements from critical hermeneutics and utopian thinking, approaching Bildung as a process involving situatedness, distantiation, and refiguration.

We are not an army of orcs: rethinking youth activism through a critical pedagogy of place

ABSTRACT The authors examine youth activism in Poland, focusing on the University of Gdańsk occupation, the Youth Climate Strike, and Stop Bzdurom’s direct actions. Using critical pedagogy of place, they analyse how youth activists drive social change and reclaim public spaces. The study highlights reinhabitation and decolonisation of public spaces as arenas for the common good and marginalised communities’ rights. It also explores the influence of radicalism and activism on society, particularly amid an ageing population and political polarisation. Detailed case analyses contribute to understanding youth roles in social movements and change, emphasising youth activism’s significance in shaping society’s future.

The Pedagogy of Place in China's Migrant Community

Purpose This article examines the curriculum and pedagogy of place for migrant children in China and advocates the recognition of migrant families’ and communities’ knowledge as necessary, relevant, and impactful curriculum. Design/Approach/Methods This article is based on a longitudinal qualitative study conducted in various migrant settlements in Beijing. Data were collected from in-depth interviews with migrant parents, teachers, and community activists and participant observations in schools, community meetings, and other gatherings in the communities. Data were coded on themes related to place-based connection, attachment, and belonging and then analyzed. Findings Findings demonstrate that pedagogical practices can be developed to re-center the knowledge and experiences of Chinese migrant communities. This pedagogical work recognizes and reflects the undervalued and unrecognized knowledge of migrant communities while investigating the meaning of “place” for migrant children. Originality/Value This is the first study putting special emphasis on the discussion of what “place” means for migrants and what knowledge is worthwhile for their children in China. A key contribution of this article is that it documents the challenges and benefits of creating a place-based curriculum and pedagogy for migrant children as they construct a sense of belonging.

Communities of practice and the elevation of urban elementary teacher discourse about critical pedagogy of place

Children who live in under-resourced communities and attend under-resourced schools deserve access to high-quality teachers and educational opportunities to support their success and well-being. This study emerged from a professional development (PD) for urban teachers working in such schools, to expand educational opportunities for elementary students through outdoor science teaching. Engaging frameworks of communities of practice (CoP) and critical pedagogy of place (CPP), this critical ethnographic study investigates how urban elementary teachers engage in discourse about critical issues of place. Additionally, the investigation seeks to understand how a CoP supports such discourse. The primary data for this study were multiple sets of researcher field notes collected from participant teachers during virtual spring and in-person summer PD. Over the course of the PD, participants shifted from viewing their outdoor teaching spaces with a deficit perspective to an asset-focused one. As they visited one another’s teaching sites, the CoP the teachers were a part of created opportunity for discourse about social justice linked to issues of place within their particular school neighborhoods. The ability of urban elementary teachers to connect social justice to issues of place and to the teaching of science has implications for countering the injustice that characterizes many urban communities in the USA and elsewhere.

Possibilities for Rural Queer Liberation: Toward a Queer Rural Place-Based Pedagogy

Combining queer pedagogy and critical pedagogy of place, a queer rural place-based pedagogy centers rural queer student experiences to foster rural queer liberation.

Youth and Community Work for Climate Justice: Towards an Ecocentric Ethics for Practice

ABSTRACT This paper traces an expanded ethical perspective for youth and community work (YCW) practice in response to the climate and biodiversity crises. Discussing ecological ethics, we problematise the liberal humanist emphasis on utilitarianism and reject it as inappropriate for YCW in these times. Instead, we argue for an ecocentric practice ethic which intrinsically values the non-human world. To advance an ecocentric ethical perspective for YCW we draw on decolonial and posthuman theory. Inspired by a Freirean dialogical approach, we apply these theoretical domains as lenses to problematise YCW practice, seeking a generative dialogue between perspectives. Through this, we identify three emergent tasks for ecocentric YCW: (a) thinking and acting beyond the individual; (b) cultivating reciprocal care and connection and (c) practicing critical pedagogies of place. This third element builds on YCW's social pedagogic tradition and provides a practical means to incorporate ecocentric ideas into practice. We conclude that, given the unprecedented implications of climate crises and biodiversity collapse, a YCW ethics that does not consider these implications for young people is insufficient for the context of practice today. Enacting an ecocentric YCW ethics requires ongoing collective praxis and dialogue between young people, practitioners, educators, managers and students.

Exploring a pedagogy of place in Iceland: Students understanding of a sense of place and emerging meanings

Exploring a pedagogy of place in Iceland: Students understanding of a sense of place and emerging meanings

Toward Pedagogies for the Future to Address the Climate Crisis

This exploratory article offers contemplative learning exercises that foster connection and intuition in order to promote adaptive intelligence and anticipatory knowing to address the uncertain future related to climate crisis. The author provides personal snapshots and reflections regarding the impact of the climate crisis and explores hopeful paths for everyday action. In specific, the article suggests that everyday revolutionary acts such as slowing down, practicing humility, and aligning economic choices with core values can make a difference. Drawing on a critical pedagogy of place, the author suggests that connection to the ecological places we inhabit matters much in our efforts toward addressing the climate crisis. A simple solution is offered; we need to harm less, love more.

Dokąd zmierza edukacja regionalna?

The aim of the article is to draw attention to the issues of changes in the perception of regional education. Departure from the previously established concept means that contemporaryyouth are not properly prepared to perceive their immediate surroundings as valuable. There was a need to redefine, but also return to the assumptions of regional education using place pedagogy. Locality and regionalism should constitute the basis for the education of subsequent generations to provide the basis for identity.

Polish minischools. Microhistories of democracy and portraits of parental involvement

In light of cognitive and social advantages of thinking upon forms and meanings of the relationship between a subject and a place of its acting, and in light of my personal inexhaustible interest in the pedagogy of place (Mendel, 2006), I found it tempting to make an attempt of describing the existence (ontology) of a school in a specific place by using phenomenological and hermeneutical analyses. My aim was to academically describe how a school happens in a specific place, being a community event, or a social drama (Turner, 1974). I have made such an attempt and in this text I make an effort to present such a description by referring to a school situated in a Polish village; a school raison d’être of which is nowadays endangered; a school which is “too small” and the existence of which is refused in view of the poverty of Polish communes. As a researcher I decided that my research material will be various phenomena, that is various aspects of the school’s life embraced in available narrations. On the one hand, by describing, I tell the story of the school but, simultaneously, I analyze the story material (contents of narration). This is how my microhistory is created (Domańska, 2005). On the other hand, I reconstruct the unique picture of minischools created through the exchange of meanings which happens within the space of this story. It is a story about schools which firstly are doomed to be closed down as they are unprofitable and later are saved by social forces through being created a new within a new legal framework (by an association). Consequently, because of the fact that main characters of this story proved to be parents who – as all people of the post-communist Poland – look with hope at their sense of agency and a democratic aspect of the order in which they live, the text can be perceived as a microhistory of democracy.

Relacje nauczyciela z rodzicami a budowanie przyjaznej przestrzeni edukacyjnej dla dziecka w wieku przedszkolnym. Narracje mężczyzn-nauczycieli edukacji przedszkolnej

The teacher-parent cooperation is an inseparable part of teachers’ work in preschool education. Although important for kindergarten, it is also often not satisfying. The aim of the qualitative research was to recognize and understand the experiences of shaping and developing relationships with parents from the perspective of male preschool teachers and to answer the question of how do they perceive and understand their relationship with parents of kindergarten children. The research based on narrative interviews was conducted in 2019–2020 among 18 male preschool teachers from Poland. The categories describing the development of relationships between male teachers and parents, ways of shaping them from a time perspective, and important values were distinguished. The results show that the conscious care of the relationship with parents by male teachers contributes to the creation of friendly educational space for children. Experiences related to relations with parents and the meanings given to them by men working in kindergartens were referred to social constructivism as a legitimate interpretation trend. Highlighted category of place understood as the material space of the kindergarten and the space of friendly social relations also made it possible to embed the narratives in the pedagogy of place as understood by Maria Mendel.

Fictional placemaking creating meaningful contexts for causal reasoning in secondary school biology education

ABSTRACT In secondary science education, students often do not feel engaged with the scientific concepts that are taught, which hinders conceptual learning. This lack of engagement can be overcome by fictional placemaking. Therefore, the purpose of our design-based research is to explore how the creation and use of fictional places lead to meaningful contexts providing opportunities for the learning of biology. Four design principles were formulated from theories on: (1) pedagogy of place; (2) communities of practice; (3) imaginative teaching; and (4) story-based learning. Based on these principles a lesson series was designed in which students were challenged to create societies living in domes on Mars as a fictional place. This lesson series was conducted in a ninth-grade class (28 students) at pre-university level. It was evaluated on the contribution of the design principles to create a meaningful context for the learning of biology. This research focuses on causal reasoning, which is a key competency in biology. The analysis of artefacts of group work showed evidence that students expressed different types of causal reasoning. Reflection on each of the design principles made clear how fictional placemaking provides opportunities for the development of students’ causal reasoning.

Reading landscapes and writing nature

This reflective article discusses lessons learned when Reading Landscapes & Writing Nature, an annual collaboration between a National Writing Project site and Weir Farm National Historical Park, migrated online in 2020 as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The organizations have used critical pedagogies of place (Gruenewald, 2003) since 2017 to guide teacher writing workshops, and reimagined the professional development in digital spaces with multimodal literacies (Kinloch, 2009; Kress, 2003). This including 360 photospheres and Padlet as tools to expand educators’ understandings of literacy, wellness, and place.

‘New localism’ in Australian schools: Country as Teacher as a critical pedagogy of place

This article reports on phasetwo of our school-based Country as Teacher research, focusing on teacher’s learning and experiences through their efforts to enact Country as Teacher curriculum and pedagogy with students in ACT schools. Cultivating their own practices of reciprocal Relating with Country (Phase 1, see Spillman, Wilson, Nixon & McKinnon, 2022) prepares teachers to enact Country as Teacher with students. A yarning circle focus group and semi-structured interviews were again used to unpack teacher’s reflections and learnings regarding their attempts to enact Country as Teacher curriculum and pedagogies through units of work. Due to major disruptions in schooling caused by a long COVID lockdown, during Term Three 2021, participation in data collection for Phase 2 of the Country as Teacher research was on a voluntary basis. Thirteen of the original twenty-six teachers offered to participate. Despite the COVID disruptions, many teachers felt that the high levels of student engagement with Country as Teacher, expressions of wellness through these experiences, and the emergence of inquiry approaches, conferred ‘permission’ to continue enacting these pedagogies in their day-to-day teaching and learning, even when perceived not to be a direct enactment of the Australian Curriculum. This flagged a clear theme in the qualitative data, of teacher’s growing desire to enact a ‘moral imperative’, to ‘do it for the students’. Teacher’s own experiences Relating with Country were also deemed essential to the motivation and courage necessary to enact Country as Teacher pedagogies. This formative research suggests that high levels of student engagement motivated teachers to reinterpret systemic accountabilities and imperatives. We propose that in this way, among others discussed below, Country as Teacher operated as a ‘critical pedagogy of place.’

The Pedagogy of Gear Touchers: Unearthing Modes of Teaching Within and Through DIY Venues

Background: Within the body of literature on do-it-yourself (DIY) music scenes, researchers have routinely placed an emphasis on the role of material space in shaping the sociocultural and musical practices of punk music and other related genres. Scholars have also examined the teaching and learning processes of these musical subcultures under the banner of “punk pedagogy” scholarship. However, investigations into the intersection between these two strands of research need to occur because theories of punk pedagogy have largely overlooked the role of physical space within the educative practices of DIY music. Research into the thematically related space of the maker movement amplifies this need, because maker education scholars have repeatedly shown the multiple ways that materials and space shape how individuals learn through DIY production. Research Questions: I use this paper to attend to the following questions: How do DIY music venues shape the pedagogical practices of DIY music scenes? And in what ways do those pedagogies align with the ideological and ethical aims of these communities? By focusing on learning within DIY venues, I consider multiple forms of musical production outside of the context of a specific genre (i.e., punk). This study therefore provides insight into the mechanisms through which individuals learn and how those mechanisms relate to the physical affordances of these spaces. Research Design: To address these questions, I conducted a year-long comparative case study into two intertwined music series centered on noise music (an experimental subgenre within DIY music’s broad umbrella) and located in two separate DIY venues. Although each of the 13 events in this series included both a workshop and a concert, I focus my analysis on the concert portion of the series to explore a common site of interaction within DIY scenes. Through open and iterative qualitative analyses of field notes generated from observations of concerts in the series and interviews with featured artists and audience members, I provide a nuanced understanding of learning within DIY music venues and the role that both material space and technologies play in shaping that process. Conclusions: Drawing on this analysis, I contend that the stageless design of DIY venues provides a physical affordance that allows “gear toucher conversations” to occur. These conversations involve audience members engaging performers in discussions about the music technologies they use mere seconds after they finish performing, thus linking this pedagogical moment to the material attributes of the venue. However, these conversations reinscribe masculine notions of technology and undermine DIY music’s egalitarian politics, a finding that mirrors critical research into maker education. This work therefore calls on both researchers and practitioners to contend with the pedagogies of place and the educative processes that emerge out of situated technologies to further the liberatory praxes that DIY production can produce.

Does Place Actually Matter? Searching For Place-based Pedagogy amongst Impact and Intentionality

The emergence of this special issue of Metropolitan Universities journal, “The Pedagogy of Place-Based Initiatives and Anchor Institutions,” stems from developing, teaching, and evaluating courses and pedagogical programs at urban/metropolitan institutions. This issue is rooted in scholarly practice and focuses on the intersection of place-based initiatives and pedagogy. It interrogates how place-based initiatives such as hyper-local community-based learning and anchor frameworks impact teaching and learning in the classroom. This framing article for this special issue captures the themes and broader questions that emerged from the articles while proposing a line of inquiry to engage the readers with the special issue focus. Our line of inquiry throughout this special issue is whether a distinct pedagogy emerges from place-based initiatives such as anchor institution approaches and hyper-local community-based learning. We begin by interrogating how place-based initiatives such as anchor institution approaches and highly intentional partnership work do not guarantee a change in classroom instruction and may fail to impact pedagogy long-term. We provide examples of service-learning within our local professional context and draw from themes that emerged from the scholarly articles in this issue. We also noted the intersection of place, institution, and systemic context. We offer a framework for a pedagogy of place with committed approaches to these place-based intersections as we have experienced them in our practice and emerging from the issue’s scholarly articles.

Exploring Place-Based Pedagogy as Entrepreneurship Accelerator

This paper proposes a framework to create a small business and entrepreneurship accelerator designed based on prior work in evolving traditional place-based pedagogy to a more critical pedagogy of place. The proposal is crafted to utilize the built-in resources of a university as the core components in providing necessary resources for success including expert-level technical assistance and a safe, empowering third space for collaboration. The included case is focused on a suburban/urban campus located near several historically underserved geographies. This is important as the proposed small business and entrepreneurship accelerator will have a special focus on educating and guiding local populations – including high school students – in growing their businesses. The proposal in this paper brings together university resources, local community elements, small business owners, social entrepreneurs, and high school students by activating a critical pedagogy of place rooted in improving economic and social issues.

Critical pedagogy of place to enhance ecological engagement activities.

Scientists in higher education institutions around the globe recognize the importance of engaging with public stakeholders to share their enthusiasm, explain their science, and encourage primary and secondary students to enter the sciences. However, without direct consideration of students' and teachers' perspectives and interests, scientists may design activities around their own goals, limiting the impact on school stakeholders (i.e., students, teachers, paraprofessional staff, students' parents, and other caregivers). We drew from natural and social science research to describe how expanding the conception of place beyond the biophysical can help engage school stakeholders in meaningful ways. We describe the multidimensional PLACE framework that we developed to integrate perspectives, knowledge, and values of all stakeholders in engagement programming. The framework is organized around topics that stakeholders should discuss early on to ensure successful partnerships. We recommend that scientists identify and use pedagogy that is inclusive; language framed around dialogic communication methods; aims and motivations centered on engagement; cultural funds of knowledge of place (i.e., disciplinary, personal, or experiential knowledge); and evaluation of engagement based on meaningful metrics. Two case studies are presented to illustrate how the PLACE framework components, when addressed, can lead to robust, successful partnerships between scientists and schools.

Pedagogies of place: conserving forms of place-based environmental education during a pandemic

ABSTRACT Can on-line ‘place-based learning’ be more than a facsimile or ritual? Using a phenomenology of my pandemic practice, I investigate the meaning of ‘place-based learning:’ entertaining Aristotle’s seminal thought on place as a container to venture into contemporary phenomenological inquiries where places and things are not only conceptually implicated by each other, but immanent and potentially powerful elements in learning experiences. Bonnett’s (2021) ecologizing of education shows that authentic forms must be embodied and emplaced in order to open learners to the more in situ, deeply-contextualized and yet ‘transcendental’ and ‘ecstatic’ reception of the more-than-human realm of nature (as what comes-forth, phusis). But this Heideggerian narrative with which I resonate poses challenges for students and place-based educators. Wittgenstein’s philosophical approach, itself modelled on place-based investigation of language (our ‘home city’), draws me back from metaphysical inclinations to dwell constructively on ordinary discourses rooted in educational practices.

Reinvigorating Country as teacher in Australian schooling: beginning with school teacher’s direct experiences, ‘relating with Country’

The Country as Teacher research project was a formative exploration of how Indigenous pedagogies might be taken-up as part of mainstream schooling for all Australian students. This paper reports on the first phase where participant teachers were guided and supported, through professional learning, to initiate their own ‘relating with Country’ practice. A Country as teacher pedagogy is enacted through cultivating the practice of reciprocal ‘relating with Country’, resulting in gratitude and learning about, from and how to care for the places we live. Enacting Country as Teacher in school-based curriculum operates as a ‘critical pedagogy of place’, contesting Eurocentric epistemic power in Australian curriculum, to provide a balanced ‘both ways’ education for all. We argue that for teachers to be able to appropriately facilitate Country as teacher pedagogies with students, they must first cultivate their own practice of ‘relating with Country’. In this paper, we examine the stories of 26 teachers in Canberra public schools as they develop their practice of relating with Country. These stories highlight the process, and participant’s challenges and successes. This paper contributes to foundational knowledge and experience for the uptake of Country as teacher pedagogies in Australian schools. Our emerging findings suggest that the practice of ‘relating with Country’ is within the reach of all teachers.