Place(s) in Education

Catalog description

In an essay about place, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz notes that "something that is a dimension of everyone's existence, the intensity of where we are, passes by anonymously and unremarked. It goes without saying." The purpose of this course is to foreground the concept of place and real places in our daily lives and academic work, particularly with respect to education (including schooling), to make sure that it does not go without saying. What is (a) place? How is it formed, bounded, made meaningful? How is it personal and social? What are its relationships with time and space? What are its relationships with experience, culture, citizenship, margins, diversity, and so many other topics? How does it shape living, especially learning and teaching in schools, and how is it shaped by these things? How do I and we fit in? And, following the feminist educational philosopher Nel Noddings, "should schools teach for an understanding and love of place or should they now offer curricula designed to transcend place?" Through a seminar format focused specifically on educational contexts, we will study place from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives and consider what these landscapes of place mean for teaching, learning, and educational research. Readings will draw from the fields of anthropology, art/s, curriculum, ecology, geography, indigenous thought, literature, philosophy, and sociology, all intersecting with education. Assignments will include citizenship in the community of this course, personal reflection about lived place(s) inside of schools and out, critical analyses of the literature on the intersections of education and place(s), and a final project focused on one aspect of how education and place(s) intersect that is of particular interest to the student. In dialogue, collaboration, the reading of each other's writings, and other activities such as a walking tour of students' most-meaningful places on campus, participants in this course will be and become citizens of the place (and its many physical, digital, and relational places) of the course. Students will exit the course with a broad understanding of the complexity of place(s) in education, including in the work of teachers and researchers.