�A FEW TEACHING GOODIES ON �PLACE / PLACE-BASED & EMBODIED PEDAGOGIES ��

Candice Rai, crai@uw.edu

QUICK NOTE FOR TEACHERS

My teaching tends to include a lot of location, place-based, and embodied components, both in terms of quick class activities and assignments.

This brief slide deck includes a few slides from an Education pedagogy course I taught for future teachers, which I included here because it gives some framing and adaptable exercises at the end. I included resources linked at the end, too, with notes.

Feel free to draw on slides or exercises or to reach out if you would like to chat or see more related stuff.

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Candice

“PLACE MATTERS….”(TUCK AND MACKENZIE) 21).

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It is hard to conceive of antiracist, culturally sustainable, equity-oriented education that is not also place-based.

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PLACE AND PLACE BASED APPROACHES

• Place is not static or neutral, not just a container or backdrop, but alive and dynamically shaping existence
• Place is shaped by cultural, ideology, long histories, human and more-than-human and it also shapes these these
• Place-based approaches stress dynamic interconnection among people, cultures, things, animals, environments, story, history, material, all the things (new materialism, Indigenous epistemology, ecological thinking)
• PBE attunes us to material conditions and the local, community, asks us to understand our positionalities and impacts of our actions, attunes us to ethics and accountability in the places we dwell
• PBE helps us understand how power and inequities (and long histories /logics like colonialism and anti-Blackness) shape(d) and continue to manifest in the present moment and helps us intervene, disrupt, conceive solutions, imagine and act toward possible futures otherwise.
• Place is always specific, grounded in lived experience, concrete, can also be grounds for action, world building, imagination, new stories
• It is hard to conceive of antiracist, culturally sustainable, equity-oriented education that is not also place based.

CRITICAL PLACE INQUIRY�TUCK AND MACKENZIE

• “Understands places as themselves mobile, shifting over time and space and through interactions with flows of people, other species, social practices
• Entails, at a more localized level, understanding places as both influ­encing social practices as well as being performed and (re)shaped through practices and movements of individuals and collectives.
• Conceptualizes place as interactive and dynamic due to these time­ space characteristics
• Recognizes that disparate realities determine not only how place is experienced but also how it is understood and practiced in turn (e.g., in relation to culture, geography, gender, race, sexuality, age, or other identifications and experiences)
• Addresses spatialized and place-based processes of colonization and settler colonization, and works against their further erasure or neutral­ization through social science research
• Extends beyond considerations of the social to more deeply consider the land itself and its nonhuman inhabitants and characteristics as they determine and manifest place
• Aims to further generative and critical politics of places through such conceptualizations/practices and via a relational ethics of accountabil­ity to people and place” (19)

SOME ADAPTABLE CLASS EXERCISES�THESE WERE CREATED IN AN EDUCATION THEORY AND PEDAGOGY COURSE FOR FUTURE ENGLISH and Writing TEACHERS. WE HAD READ A CLUSTER OF ARTICLES ON EMBODIED AND PLACE-BASED PEDAGOGIES, SO WE USED THIS AS A WAY TO EITHER THINK THROUGH AND/OR IMPLEMENT IDEAS FROM THE READINGS WHILE ALSO PRACTICING THE PEDAGOGY ITSELF.

• Take an idea on a walk. (Groups only, please) This can be done on your own or with others. (but for today, please go with peers). For this walk, the idea for your walk is equity-oriented, antiracist, inclusive education and how place-based, embodied approaches support those aims . Keep walking and keep talking. Do not drift away from the idea but do meander within. Draw connections to our course or your experiences, tease out ideas, allow worries or confusion to surface. Someone keep time and come back to class in 20 minutes. After: What was it like to take your idea on a walk?
• Field research. (Group or Solo) Such research can involve observation, interview, sketching, photos, fields note, and more. Point is you are a body among other bodies and things and places. Typically, you would have a research question or aim in mind and be working toward a project (and have more time). Today, I’ll give you a topic and some initial questions: Your aim is to do an accessibility audit of our campus with disabilities advocates. How accessible is our campus? What can you discover about how (in)accessible our spaces (inside and out) are? Who is our campus designed for and who might feel excluded in various places? Take notes, photos, gather evidence, make observations, what are some initial observations and recommendations. If your group splits off, be sure to build in time to compare observations. After: What did you learn that you would not have discovered in you had not been in a place doing fieldwork?
• Stranging Place. (Solo journeys only, please.) We often move through spaces and places without paying much attention, especially in places that we are familiar with and move through often. Today, I’m asking you to notice things you wouldn’t normally (or maybe be reflective on what you typically notice). Perhaps you might decide to pay attention only to animals or to only look at the trees. Maybe you only look down or up. Perhaps you want to skip and see what that is like or to explore hidden spots you usually walk by. Maybe you look only at graffiti or posters or you can keep changing your perspective and wander more aimlessly. What do your usual habits of moving or noticing allow you to see or not see or do or not do? Where do these patterns come from? Do not just walk from point A to point B. Resist usual patterns of thinking and interpreting. Take notes, photos or just take notice. After: Describe what you did and a couple things you noticed. How did this experience affect how you might move or observe in places in the future?
• Sensorium. (Solo journeys only, please) Take a walk or find a spot, outside preferably. You need a notebook or typing device. You can record yourself if you prefer. Pay attention to your body and sense. What do you hear, touch, feel, taste, see? What sensations do you experience? How does your body feel? What emotions do you experience? These notes are yours. No need to share them. But spend the last 5 minutes or so choosing a few lines you wrote or moving towards a short poem. After: What was this experience like for you? Read a couple of lines from your writing if you are comfortable.
• Texts/Genres in the Wild (Group or solo). Choose a text/genre on campus. Something not viewed through a screen, please. Could be a poster or series of posters, a statue, architecture, something scribbled inside a bathroom stall, or whatever it is you interpret as a text. Conduct a visual /rhetorical analysis. Consider audience, content, purpose, context, what surrounds the text, impact, consequences, power dynamics, and more. Take some notes and a photo if you can. What questions does this text raise for you? What does it tell you about these places and what people care about or what matters (or doesn’t)? What does this text suggest about how to use or be in this space (or not do/be/think)? What did you learn about campus life? What else? After: Share the text you chose, questions you explored, and a couple of things from your analysis (Note: I have adapted as a genre analysis and visual analysis activity)

A COUPLE RESOURCES

• For place-based and research intensive writing classes, I love Try This: Research Methods for Writers, an open source textbook. There are tons of quick and great class activities for writing classes. Relevant for place-based approaches, check our chapter 5, “Working with People,” Chapter 6, :Working with Places and Things,” and Chapter 7 “Working with Visuals.” Entire text linked here.
• Also a fan of Stephanie Springgay and Sarah Truman’s Walking Methodologies and counter-mapping projects work which the earlier exercises draw on some. Check out there website: there’s a ton of sample walking projects here and podcasts that explore things like critical countermapping, sonic walks, approaches to movement/place based classroom activities, etc. (could be adapted for quick classroom activity or assignments). Also a book is linked here if you are interested in that.