Critical Pedagogy of Place

“At the heart of eco-art practice is the desire to educate,” writes Rosenthal (2007). Educational strategy is key to linking art with environmental concerns. And yet conventional education can be described as the enforced isolation of learners from both culture and ecosystem (Gruenwald, 2003b p. 625).

M’Gonigle and Starke (2006) explore how the physical character of universities shapes knowledge and inquiry, “embedding the experiences and values formed by an ever-extending detachment from place” (p. 59). In universities, with their sprawling acres of parking lots, cafeteria food contracts with multinational corporations, and academics who “work as part of a system of organizing, disseminating and collecting knowledge that has no physical domain” (p. 151), “place-as-local is but a nostalgic concern, because the land has progressively lost its ‘agency’ in shaping human affairs.” (p. 65). The existing space for education is non-place, space that has been stripped of specificity. M’Gonigle and Starke describe this non-place as “deeply pedagogical.” (p. 67). In their view, power-over-place constitutes a “shadow curriculum” that makes some things thinkable, but not others. Is an alternative approach to knowledge and inquiry possible?

Gruenwald (2003 a and b) suggests a possible approach to this question thru the “critical pedagogy of place.” Bioregionalism advocates a place-based education. This can be paired with a critical pedagogy that seeks social transformation through attention to relationships of power. He writes, “If place-based educators seek to connect place with self and community, they must identify and confront the ways that power works thru places to limit the possibilities of human and nonhuman others” (2003 a, p. 7). He articulates “an emerging multidisciplinary framework for place-conscious education that is attuned to both ecology and culture” (p. 647 n. 4). M’Gonigle, M. and Starke, J. (2006) note that our gaze has been fixed up, on placeless power. In their view, the time has come to focus down, embedding pedagogy in place, creating radical (in the root sense of the word) new knowledges.

NEXT:Art as Place-Based Education

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