Developing an Understanding of Place-Based Education and Critical Literacy

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Developing an Understanding of Place-Based Education and Critical Literacy

by Caroline Miskovsky 

This blog post is the first of many that will give an overview of the discussion and the articles that we’ve read for our Teaching Appalachia course at West Virginia University. For this week’s discussion, we read four articles that introduce, defend, and discuss two teaching strategies, place-based pedagogy and critical literacy. We also discussed these two methods synthesized as critical pedagogy of place. Here is a brief synopsis of each article (pulled from the abstract, because, well, if it ain’t broke…) so that I can refer to them more easily throughout this post. You can scroll to the bottom of this post to find a complete reference list.

Peter McInerney, John Smyth, and Barry Down, “‘Coming to a place near you?’ The politics and possibilities of a critical pedagogy of place-based education”

“This paper explores the theoretical foundations of place-based education (PBE) and considers the merits and limitations of current approaches with particular reference to Australian studies. The authors argue that there is a place for PBE in schools but contend that it must be informed by a far more critical reading of the notions of ‘place’, ‘identity’ and ‘community’.”

Jessica Parker, “Critical Literacy and the Ethical Responsibilities of Student Media Production”

 “This study highlights 12th graders in California who produced a documentary on Latino immigration and chronicles the complex interactions between student-generated media, critical literacy, and ethics.”

David Gruenewald, “The Best of Both Worlds: A Critical Pedagogy of Place”

“Taking the position that “critical pedagogy” and “place-based education” are mutually supportive educational traditions, this author argues for a conscious synthesis that blends the two discourses into a critical pedagogy of place.”

Mitzi  Lewison, Amy Seely Flint, and Katie Van Sluys, “Taking on Critical Literacy: The Journey of Newcomers and Novices”

“Examines the understandings and classroom practices of two groups of teachers: newcomers and novices. Provides insights into the concerns teachers have when they begin implementing critical practices in their classrooms.”

Gruenewald’s critical pedagogy of place calls for us to use the environment and communities of our students to “challenge the assumptions, practices, and outcomes [of] dominant culture and conventional education” (2003, p. 3). This critical approach with a basis in place calls for social change from the inside, for students to define the problems of their day and work to solve them, and for place to give regional educational efforts a distinct flavor and appeal for those who live there. For teachers, this requires creativity and extra effort. For students, this approach asks them to challenge, sometimes uncomfortably, the assumptions of the dominant culture—both of their nation and locally. This emphasis requires teachers and students to embrace the political nature of education, and for students to bring their ability to negotiate power into focus.

Like some of the authors, we were a little apprehensive that critical pedagogy of place would be a hard sell in a “public policy environment, obsessed…with imposed curriculum, standardized testing, and performance management regimes” (McInerney et al. 2011, p. 5). The sturdiest value in these big ideas lies in the shifts toward immediacy that they encourage in the classroom. Sure, we can read about Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, but why not strengthen her potential relevance for someone in West Virginia with a character like Lace in Strange as This Weather Has Been (http://annpancake.blogspot.com/ )? We read these four articles and supported many, if not all, of the claims they suggested; we were most anxious about the viability of these texts in a real-life classroom with real-life content standards breathing down your neck.

The Lewison, Seely Flint, and Van Sluys article gave us a chance to clarify critical literacy’s main points and define what we thought this approach could look like in a West Virginia classroom. The authors define critical literacy as that which “disrupt[s] the commonplace, interrogat[es] multiple viewpoints, focus[es] on sociopolitical issues, and tak[es] action and promot[es] social justice” (2002, p. 382). We thought that boiled down, these factors involved using an inquisitive mind that takes nothing for granted, and that examines power structures as they play out in our perceptions, actions, language. Teachers and students should then take those findings and use them to inform their behavior moving forward in everyday interactions and in larger social change. Once we had our characterizations clarified, we did our best to come up with actions within our classrooms that could make use of our definition of critical literacy.

We might organize our English language arts units thematically, instead of generically. This allows us to examine one theme—let’s say poverty—from multiple mediums. We can involve perspectives that are shut out of most conversations, and challenge all the implicit and dangerous baggage that often comes rooted in a social issue—here, that poor people are lazy, dirty, and deserve their lot. We can use Appalachian authors like Lee Maynard or Nikki Giovanni (http://www.leemaynard.com/ and http://nikki-giovanni.com/) in our units, questioning their perspectives as much as those in the traditional canon. We can be sensitive to the fact that dialect and linguistic patterns are part of identity, while still challenging some of the racist and bigoted assumptions that are nonetheless embedded in our culture. We can ask our students where power structures in our state have come from, and what those people are doing with the economic and political control in their hands. In any case, corporations like Massey Energy and Walmart certainly have a complicated relationship with the West Virginians they employ.

The devil hides in the details of the execution of critical place-based education. McInerney, Smyth, and Brown admit that there are limits to what place-based education can do for our classrooms. It cannot, for example, replace a global perspective entirely. We live in an interconnected world and asking students to become so myopic that they have little concern for anything outside their own backyard would obviously be counterproductive. Place-based education can give students ownership of their environment and what they can do to change it, but we must be careful to avoid discussing place as a “romanticised relic of the past”—a phenomenon that happens all too often when we reminisce about the rolling hills of home (McInerney et al. 2011, p. 9).

We will instead look at place for the reality and possibility it represents, as a “dynamic institution with regional, national, and global connections” (McInerney et al. 2011, p. 9). We must, like Carmen and Brittany put it in class, “interlace a global and local perspective in our lessons,” because a failure to connect place-based education to the global environment sterilizes efforts to make real change. We can insert a local perspective to give meaning to global problems that seem too far away to matter, or ask students how to solve a big problem by using resources in their own community. This approach, as so many of the authors emphasize, gives students a real sense of agency and efficacy about social change. No one is looking to erase national and corporate responsibility for the economic and environmental disasters that have characterized West Virginia’s history by asking students to take a stand. But if we don’t at least begin the conversation, will anyone else really care enough to clean up the coal slurries or reduce welfare dependency?

What about this process might be uncomfortable for students and their families, teachers, and the community at-large? Put simply, can makes things awkward when we disagree with those closest to us. Critical pedagogy calls for us to make change where stasis and stagnation are easier routes; when we criticize ourselves, our neighbors, and our own way of life, the call to action is at once much more difficult to make and much harder to ignore. Won’t parents come banging on our doors, wondering why their son or daughter is doing a project on prejudice in West Virginia if race and sexuality are taboo subjects in their household? Do we want to be seen stirring the pot—after all, is it worth our jobs or our place of respect in the community?

For Brandi, a student-centered approach answers many of these concerns. When students design their own projects, they are deciding for themselves where they draw their line in the sand. They are deciding exactly how far they want to take a West Virginia or Appalachia-centric social action project. We teachers are simply giving them the venue to ask questions about a hot-button topic. Parker is illustrative here: her piece about critical literacy and student film-making explores two students’ documentaries produced for a senior thesis project in California. The teens were given a year’s worth of materials on immigration, poverty, and class struggles. They were then instructed to make a documentary film about immigration to engage directly with the issue and distill their narrative point of view on the subject. Their teacher did not goad them to feel one way or another, though Sam raised the point that the year’s materials likely had a particular social justice-y political flavor that could influence the bend of the student documentaries.

Perhaps we could take student choice even further with West Virginia teens. Students could research any social issue germane to the state, then make a documentary film informed by their heavy research. Students could read works of fiction and watch films related to their social issue just as the teens in the Parker article did, but they would in a sense design their own curriculum. As Audra put it, our students are already presented with artificial binaries that box them into for-or-against camps. Using our classrooms as spaces to hold their opinions up to the light and try on new views—especially for the issues that matter to them and their families—is something teachers have simply got to do. In the national news, West Virginia is a single issue state: coal and coal mining disasters dominate what little West Virginia news coverage the media moguls allow. What would happen if we asked our students how they felt about education, job opportunities, and economic growth in our state, or the tourist industry, protection of civil liberties, and environmental issues? We are too often polarized by the Friends of Coal or I Love Mountains bumper stickers on our cars, and a project that allows West Virginia teens to do their own research and form their own opinions could do a lot to broaden the scope.  

Above all, we thought that these conversations would be uncomfortable, yet worthwhile. Growing pains are OK. We will make mistakes, stumble, and come across stubborn roadblocks. That’s OK, too. We just can’t afford to be afraid to care because of these inevitabilities. 

References

Gruenewald, D. (2003). The best of both worlds: A critical pedagogy of place. Educational Researcher, 32 (4), 3-12.

Lewison, M., Seely Flint, A., & Van Sluys, K. (2002). Taking on critical literacy: The journey of newcomers and novices. Language Arts, 79 (5), 382-392.

McInerney, P., Smyth, J., & Down, B. (2011). ‘Coming to a place near you?’ The politics and possibilities of a critical pedagogy of place based education. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 39 (1), 3-16.

Parker, J. (2013). Critical literacy and the ethical responsibilities of a student media production. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 56(8), 668-676.