Place of Learning Presentation Slides

8/9/2019 Place of Learning Presentation Slides

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The Place of LearningThinking about place, home and selfhood in the curriculum


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Beginning in wonder


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[Philosophy] does not begin in something out of the ordinary, but in the bringing

to awareness of the most ordinary; it does not find its limit in something that

transcends our everyday experience, but in the very being there of that

experience;it does not find its end in a space or time beyond, but only in thisplace(Malpas, 2006)


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A particular place on earth can be a kind of curricular lens through which all

traditional school subjects may be closely examined. The immediacy and

relevance of place in the lives of students can be a huge catalyst to deep

learning learning at the level of understanding. The discovery that develops

in attempts to find out why the place looks and feels as it does yields a kind ofintellectual satisfaction that cannot be matched even by the complete mastery

of a disconnected textbook curriculum.(Theobald and Siskar, 2008)


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Why talk about place and identity in our times?


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In much contemporary discussion, place is a notion that has been viewed

with a great deal of suspicion as a romantic affectation or as arising out of

some sedentary conservatism.(Malpas, 1999)


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The politics of home have had a fraught and vicious history on the continent, and perhaps

that explains how they have been set aside, and so deliberately ignored. But belonging can

be reinterpreted and that's where a host of seemingly unrelated cultural responses to our

predicament seem to be forging a new understanding

Rather, the politics of home is an ongoing project, something that has to be constantly

renewed and recreated; belonging is about shared commitment, as relevant, Idiscovered,

on the moors of North Yorkshire where Igrew up, as on the streets of London's East End

where Inow live.(Madeleine Bunting, in The Guardian, October 2009)


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Place as possibility


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Places, at least in part, make us who we are. In so far as they do this, they also have a

bearing on who we will be. A child born into a placeless world would be surely

impoverished by such a dire circumstance. Places are part of the inheritance we pass on

to future generations,yet as many a writer has noted, we have been busy in recent

decades creating a world without places, or at the very least a world in which all places

seem alike. I believe that asserting the importance of place, far from betraying an

underlying conservatism, is to assert the future of possibility. Places are where the

future germinates, where possibilities emerge. In Search of Lost Place


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..the idea of place does not so much bring a certain politics with it, as define the very

frame within which the political itself must be located.(Malpas, 1999)


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Finding Oneself


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While a liberal education encouraged students to open their eyes to the world around

them and see possibilities of social progress, global perspectives teach them to gaze

inwards at themselves and internalize limited human aspirations. In other words, it

seeks to deny them their humanity.(Standish, 2008)


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...the claim is that we are the sort of thinking, remembering, experiencing creatures we

are only in virtue of our active engagement in place; that the possibility of mental life is

necessarily tied to such engagement, and so to the places in which we are engaged; and

that, when we come to give content to our concepts of ourselves and to the idea of our

own self-identity, place and locality play a central role our identities are, one can say,

intricately and essentially place-bound.(Malpas, 1999)


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Homecoming?


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The home-place Iknew then was not the whole, or even the essence of the place to

which Inow return. The movement of such a journey of departure and homecoming is

from part to whole and back to part. But the second part is a part that directly reflects

the whole, for nowIknow my home in the light of the larger place-world through which

Ihave travelled. HadIremained at home and not left, Iwould never have come to see itin such a different and more complete light. The longest way around is the shortest way

home.(Casey, 1993)


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Genuine education leads us back to ourselves, to the place we are (the Da of ourSein),

teaches us to dwell (wohnen) here and transforms us in the process. This

transformative journey back to ourselves is not a flight away from the world into

thought, but a reflexive return to the fundamentalrealm of the human sojourn. The

goal of this educational odyssey remains simple but revolutionary: To bring us full circle

back to ourselves, by first turning us away from the world in which we are most

immediately immersed and then turning us back to this world in a more reflexive way.

(Thomson, 2005)


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Directions for research?


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Good precedents:

Young PeoplesGeographies

LivingG

eographyWhereWill I Live?


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In the pipeline:

Maps of Memory A potential Heritage Lottery funded project that will see young

people in Sheffield exploring their industrial heritage from a geographical perspective.

Using photographic fieldwork methods, interviewing techniques and archival researchyoung people will work together to create online maps of memory and exhibition The

project will be fully peer-evaluated.


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In the pipeline:

MyPlace, My City, MyWorld a proposed three-year project that would be funded

by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. The Geographical Association would roll out a

nationwide programme of place-based community geography. Focused primarily ondeveloping the speaking and listening capacities of 11-14 year olds in real-world

settings.


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Research:

-Tied in with MyPlace, My City, MyWorld

-Participatory; working directly with teachers and young people who are taking

part in the project-Use of diaries, blogs, Nings?


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The question I am asking:

As young people take part in MyPlace, My City, MyWorld and Maps of

Memory are their existing notions and beliefs about their place, their home,challenged?

Documents

Place of Learning Presentation Slides