The following is part 1 of an on-going discussion on place-based education topics between Gregory Smith of Lewis and Clark College and David Greenwood of Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario (formerly of Washington State University). You are invited to participate in this discussion and can add your comments through the reply box at the bottom of the post.
7/21/10
Hi David,
I’ve been meaning to touch base with you about my experience in Juneau doing a place-based education institute a month ago. What I encountered there raised some questions for me about whether it’s possible to marry the wisdom of Indigenous educational systems to what happens in Western schools, even though this underlies at least some of what I’m attempting to accomplish as I advocate for place- and community-based approaches. I’m wondering whether it is appropriate to link a goal-based meritocratic enterprise with a process of acculturation that is at base spiritual, humane, and ecological. As a result of an unspoken tension between me and the Tlingit elders and leaders who were part of the team that organized the institute, I found myself increasingly questioning the application of the goal- and accountability-dominated curriculum development process encountered in contemporary schools with the kinds of more open-ended and improvisational learning experiences that connect young people to community and place encountered in Indigenous societies. All of this reminds me of your feelings about the importance of not letting place-based efforts get sucked into the assessment miasma that has hijacked public schools. It also reminds me of Illich’s insights about ways that schools are a fundamentally colonizing institution and that societies might be better off without them.
At the same time, a large part of me says, we’ve got to figure out how to work with the institutions have. But I’m wondering. In her June 27-July 3 Grace Lee Boggs—the social activist who has been so involved in grassroots efforts to regrow Detroit–makes this observation:
I was especially interested in Growing Power’s [Will Allen’s urban gardening initiative in Milwaukee, WI] Community-school partnerships. These projects will only work, Will emphasized, if teachers are willing to get their hands dirty in the soil along with the kids. His concern identifies the new challenges teachers face as education is redefined to mean engaging schoolchildren from K-12 in community-building activities.
Fortunately some teachers are accepting the challenge. In their important new book Place and Community-based Education in Schools (Routledge 2010) Gregory Smith and David Sobel describe the special efforts that teachers in different cities are taking to involve their students in addressing local issues.
The fundamentals of the new pedagogy are outlined in two articles. In the Handbook of Social Justice in Schools, edited by William Ayers, Therese Quinn, David Stovall. Routledge 2009.
Julio Cammarito, and Augsutine F. Romero call their approach “Socially Compassionate Intellectualism for Chicano/a students.” It begins with cooperative learning or greater equality in the relationship between teachers and students. Teachers help students realize their potential
for changing the conditions in their communities.
Lawrence Tan calls his educational philosophy “Emancipatory Pedagogy: A Rehumanizing approach to Teaching and Learning with Inner City Youth.” In this approach the teacher’s role is to help students use the skills they develop inside classrooms to create change outside the classroom. Students study social movements, create documentaries of their communities, and engage in local social actions
As the schools crisis deepens, hundreds of thousands of teachers face layoffs. They can spend their time lamenting their hardships and struggling to get back their old jobs. OR they can take advantage of this strategic moment to redefine the role of teachers to become full partners with students and parents in the visionary transformation of education so that students have the tools they need to create a more just, democratic, and sustainable world.
The time has come for teaching and learning to contribute to creating democratic, resilient communities within thriving ecosystems.
Maybe as our society transitions away from capitalism (see Immanuel Wallerstein’s recent work and his talk at the US Social Forum with Grace), public schools as we know them will also undergo a dramatic transformation—in part because the society as a whole is no longer willing to pay for them. Maybe, as Grace suggests, place- and community-based educators can participate in this process by resituating where education happens and redefining what it means to be educated.
Greg Smith
Lewis and Clark College
Portland, Oregon
Greg,
Thanks for your reflections. What I hear you describing is exactly the tension I feel everyday around education. On the one hand, schools are part of a system of colonization, domination, and control, and other the other, schools can be places of transformation, participation, and emancipation. Most of all, I believe, schools are what the people inside of them make them, and I am with you when you express your hope that we can make them better and more responsive to people, place, community, and planet. I think the only way to really accomplish this is if people within schools begin to work more with the great number of people and organizations outside of schools who are doing the work of social justice, ecological stewardship, peace, and democracy. This is the promise of place-based education, and other kinds of adjectival educations (i.e., peace education, environmental education, education for social justice, etc.), that purposefully seek relationships with non-school community members as part of how schools work.
Just last week I was in Toronto for a one day conference on Sustainability and Community at York University (http://research.news.yorku.ca/2010/07/15/interdisicplinary-symposium-focuses-on-education-and-climate-change/). Toronto, by the way, is an amazing city—extremely cosmopolitan and multicultural. The man who drove my taxi—a Punjabi named Kuldip—told me that there are three Hindi radio stations in Toronto. Amazing for me to hear, having just come out of the mountains in Idaho where you are lucky even to pull in a country or western station. Anyway, the York conference was led by Chuck Hopkins, a long time environmental educator and international organizer of sustainability education. With a deep history of leadership at UN summits on education and environment going back at least to the Tbilisi Declaration , Chuck now holds a UNESCO Chair for reorienting teacher education for sustainability; he is also on the faculty at York. Like Grace Lee Boggs, Chuck is an elder in a movement of movements for better education and more sustainable communities. Certainly place-based education is part of this larger movement.
I had an excellent dinner with Chuck and others from York and from Toronto’s neighborhoods, incidentally, at a great all vegan restaurant (very low carbon footprint!). I could have listened to Chuck tell inspiring stories all night. He was talking about all the engaged work to revitalize education at all levels and in all kinds of communities in countries all over the world. Of all Chuck’s stories, three stand out to me. First, York is involved in a sustained effort to reorient its teacher education program for education for sustainability in Toronto (all teacher education programs and all schools need similar efforts). Second, apparently both Sweden and Germany have recently resolved to make sustainability a central theme in their respective country’s institutions of higher education (can we do that here in the US?). Third, United Nations University, with Chuck’s help, is leading a huge action research project to develop “Regional Centres of Expertise” in 75 cities to achieve the goal of the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (http://www.ias.unu.edu/sub_page.aspx?catID=108&ddlID=183).
The point I want to make is summed up nicely by Chuck Hopkins: We’ve got to transition from education for development to education for sustainable development. I very much like this compressed statement, and I think, Greg, that it relates to the tensions that you see between place-based education, Indigenous education, and schools. What we have in most schools is an education for development paradigm. The development agenda, which serves a vision of limitless economic growth rather than a vision of sustainable communities, so dominates most schools that many educators themselves are unaware of its pervasive power. But as Grace Lee Boggs says, many teachers do recognize that we need a new vision, that we have to redefine education as a community-building activity that serves people, and I would add, places and planet. This new vision, it seems to me, is one that many people around the world share, whether they call it place-based education, community-based education, education for sustainable development, environmental education, critical pedagogy, ecopedagogy, etc., etc., etc.
What Chuck Hopkins helped me remember in Toronto last week is that it this is redefining education necessarily a local and global movement, and in order for it to make headway within the development paradigm, the movement to transform education needs to become better connected to other social movements. Everywhere, education needs to be reoriented as education for sustainable development, because if it is not, what we will be left with is education for development that is proven everyday to be unsustainable, both now and in the long run. My feeling today is that people interested in place need to participate in and help nurture the mega-movement, both locally and globally. I think teachers can start this work by developing relationships with local non-profits who are focused on improving the quality of life for some segment of the human or other-than-human community. And then, teachers also need to begin organizing at the building and district level—and for this they will also need the support and perhaps leadership of those outside of the formal school community.
David A. Greenwood
Associate Professor
Department of Teaching and Learning
College of Education
Washington State University
Hi David and Greg,
I just happened to have stumbled upon this and saw you two, my mentors, talk about the issues we all are passionate about I could not help but to add my voice. Greg, I can understand your frustration as you desire to make education free of regimes and controls. As David rightly points out Western cultures are more defined by their institutions, of which the school is a good example. Illich though had spoken about doing away with schools; I have always been of the view that within the institutionalized cultures he found himself in that suggestion could only go as far as it did. And, should I have ever had the chance to go coffee with Illich my first question would have been: what about keeping schools and rethinking the concept or notion of teaching?
I have always agreed with Stephen Sterling, another teacher of mine, that teaching (education) as a change agency should itself become a subject of change.
So, David is right. The focus should be on how institutions like schools function. The people in schools should learn to work with people outside schools, and here we are talking about community-focused learning. David and I have talked about ‘Transgressive Pedagogies.’ as a starting point to redirect ‘government school learning’. We did not just talk about it we practiced it: we sent our students out in the community to explore how they could use the community as a resource for learning. It is about utilizing existing institutions such as schools to reconstruct the purposes of teaching and learning. We may not be able to do away with all the regimes and institutional barriers as David describes them, but our challenge as place-conscious educators is to make policy and policy leaders understand what it means to transgress in teaching.
Kia ora Korua Greg and David
It was nice to stumble upon this discussion as I surfed the internet waves whilst taking time out from a Conference, here in Australia.
Greg, I really want to respond to your comments about your recent experiencesin Juneau. I spent some time in Juneau (August, 2003) when Andy Hope III was still alive and running these. You said:
” I’m wondering whether it is appropriate to link a goal-based meritocratic enterprise with a process of acculturation that is at base spiritual, humane, and ecological. As a result of an unspoken tension between me and the Tlingit elders and leaders who were part of the team that organized the institute, I found myself increasingly questioning the application of the goal- and accountability-dominated curriculum development process encountered in contemporary schools with the kinds of more open-ended and improvisational learning experiences that connect young people to community and place encountered in Indigenous societies”.
I think what you’ve “hit” is the indigenous epsitemological/ontological reef that many of us non-indigenous teachers/academics face worldwide. It’s the recognition of how deeply embedded notions of “progress” sit within the worldwide schooling system (which is becoming increasingly privatised).
Greg, your reflections remind me of the current New Zealand Government and its mantra for Maori education:”Maori achieving educational success as Maori”. The reality is that there is no crisis in “Maori education” rather an ongoing historical failure of the Crown in terms of what it is providing in terms of “Maori schooling”.
For me, Greg, it seems that, during your stay in Juneau, you’ve been removed from your cultural comfort zone and seen that there truly are other ways of seeing and feeling the world/s around us. I know you both would be the first to say that it’s one thing to theorize about indigenous epistemologies and ontologies and it’s another to experience them in their cultural/place contexts.
Based on my own experiences in Juneau and Fairbanks, plus my ongoing work in New Zealand (alongside Ngai Tahu colleagues),I feel your now really seeing and feeling the full range of problems that emanate from a mechanical schooling system that was introduced into indigenous communities to “remove the native” from the child.
It is also the uncomfortbale realization of self in relation to colonial/neocolonial history and current privilege and our shared privileged position in the “academy”. So, I have two questions for you both that are open to my non-indigenous North American colleagues (and anyone else around the world who wishes to comment):
1. “why is it so difficult for non-indigenous academics/teachers in the US to see their own professional practice/lives as being relevant to the “Indian Treaties” successive US/Canadian governments have breached, locally and nationally?
2. “What is the role of the non-indigenous US/Canadian academic in terms of giving meaningful recognition and effect to “Native” or “Aboriginal sovereignty” via place-based education/critical pedagogies of place?
3. In what ways can non-indigenous US/Canadian teachers/academics decolonize themselves if they cannot see/hear their local indigenous communities and associated socio-ecological experiences?
4. Why do indigenous peoples of Canada and the US often get placed at the bottom of the multicultural totem pole of place-based educational priorities? [usually built by ‘multicultural or “non-indigenous” acadermics and teachers = people who look and sound just like me)?
5. How would you both,as US/Canadian-based academics, grapple with racism in local communities that render indigenous people invisible/silent? [I’m skeptical that “community” is necessarily neutral or “good”. Can’t always assume that all people in the community will welcome critical interrogations of local hegemonic practices]
Trust me, I’m asking similar unsettling questions in relation to my own practice and the wider New Zealand & Australian contexts I have to work with. I would warmly welcome your thoughts(Greg) and David, plus I’d welcome comments from any other readers, who might choose to share experiences/views.
Noho ora mai
Richard Manning
Treaty of Waitangi Education Programme Coordinator
University of Canterbury College of Education
Christchurch
New Zealand
Tena koutou David, Richard and Greg
It was a pleasant surprise this morning to stumble upon a conversation on a website I was not aware of between two US academics I have very much enjoyed reading and Richard, my teachers college tutor from nearly a decade ago.
The issues you are discussing are what I am particularly interested in as I start a 6 month Royal Society Fellowship in New Zealand on place-based approaches to history education. The tension between a place-based approach and an education system based on scientific management theory, progress and an extreme form of individualism that separates learners and teachers from any sense of ecological embeddedness is certainly a challenging one, especially when many teachers do not have the theoretical background to even begin to unpack it.
There is a strong movement in history education at the moment for historical consciousness, or historical thinking, which I have been a part of. I have met with Peter Seixas from the University of British Columbia and spent considerable time with Keith Barton from the University of Indiana. The basic idea, and I risk oversimplifying, is that historical consciousness, (which draws heavily on sociocultural theories of learning) seeks to explore the ways groups in society today perceive and use the past. Historical thinking uses the habits of mind of an historian to critically challenge these perceptions. The overriding goal is to create the kinds of students able to participate in a pluralist democracy. By engaging in controversial issues with “reasoned judgement”, by assessing the agency of historical actors, by looking at the past through a multiplicity of perspectives and by discussing moral and ethical issues of the past, looking at change over time and cause and effect, all grounded in the critical use of evidence, students will hopefully emerge as better citizens.
This, I think, is all good stuff compared to the discourse of coverage and control and the mind numbing uselessness of most assessment that most students experience in schools. However, it is still heavily reliant on western epistemological frameworks which are where my thinking is at the moment. I don’t believe there is anything inherently wrong with “the West” although many, possibly most aspects of it have much to be desired as we face ecological crises around the world. But, the problem is when even the best of the West comes at the expense of other ways of knowing that are perhaps more suited to many of the goals of a critical pedagogy of place. Literature on historical consciousness is quite explicit in acknowledging that this emerging field should also recognise multiple epistemological and ontological assumptions, but in practice, I haven’t really seen it happen. The reason for this I suspect it that very few historical thinking academics (or teachers like me) have a deep and experiential knowledge of indigenous approaches to the past.
So, in response to Richard’s final question: “How would you both, (and anyone else around the world who wishes to comment), grapple with racism in local communities that render indigenous people invisible/silent?” I have a few ideas that may, (or may not) work to overcome the possibility of something with noble goals such as historical thinking on its own, probably still rendering indigenous people and their more ecological framework for looking at the past invisible. Perhaps you have some comments on them.
1) Richard has showed in his research that the historical experiences of the Maori people indigenous to the territory of my school are rendered, at best, invisible and at worst, or perhaps by association, irrelevant by history teachers like myself. I had an informal meeting with a representative of this tribal grouping last year to discuss what might be done about this and the Wellington Area Teachers’ Association are following her advice to write to the Chairman of the Port Nicholson Settlement trust to suggest a meeting with the educational committee to brainstorm ways to further a partnership between local schools. We’ll see what happens.
2) As a part of my royal society fellowship I am completing a second year paper on cultural mapping with the school of Maori Studies to explore what this might look like for history teachers and hope to trial my findings in the classroom and disseminate anything useful.
3) The concept of “place” needs, I think to play a major role in all history education. However, its more geographic connotations makes this a hard conceptual leap for teachers and historical thinking theorists. (I also worry that “place-based” education is sometimes translated to “location-based” education, thereby missing opportunities to really unpack the contested concept of place as we teach and learn in certain physical locations). As such I am travelling to Los Angeles to spend a couple of weeks working with the Hypercities Project at UCLA, a digital humanities venture that tries to bring together history and geography using historical GIS, cultural mapping, historical maps and historical geography under the assumption that “every past is a place”. Perhaps this, or at the very least the assumptions about history that it encourages will be able to help bridge some of the inherent tensions between western and indigenous ways of looking at the past. There is only so much that the digital world can do though when one considers that much indigenous knowledge is taught in certain locations and certainly not in school classrooms. Another challenge facing me and my classroom colleagues!
4) Ultimately though I think the purpose of historical thinking education needs to be more closely aligned with the purposes of place-consciousness education, especially the more critical versions of it. I think Chet Bowers is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There is much good in many aspects of historical thinking despite its “deep cultural assumptions” that Bowers would probably critique. But having said that, until historical thinking academics frame their pleas for more historical thinking in terms of eco-justice, and in ways that, as Richard said, are grounded in experiential knowledge of epistemologies different from western ways of knowing, this is going to be an uphill battle. In New Zealand anyway it is going to have to mean more history teachers speaking Maori.
An interesting conversation!!
Michael Harcourt
History and Social Studies teacher
Wellington High School
Wellington
New Zealand