Shaping the Learning Landscape:

The Power of the Theoretical ‘Selfie,’ Pt 4

As instructors and critics, when we rest contentedly behind our secure Ivory Tower walls, complacently reliant upon tritely coined phraseology, we alienate our students and readers, a pertinent and perplexing problem as liberal arts degrees fall further and further out of favor in American education. [1] hooks (2003) is critical of this disaffecting practice, noting that educators often employ an “agenda…where writing acceptable theory…often meant using inaccessible language and/or academic jargon,” language she describes as “simply not accessible” to students (p. xii). Jargon: the language that incites academic cynicism. The preventative measure: Narrative, place-based education in a democratic learning environment creating an easily accessible landscape of learning.

By escaping the confining walls of the classroom, Gruenewald (2003a) states that place-based education “aims to work against the isolation of schooling’s discourses and practices from the living world outside the increasingly placeless institution of schooling (p. 620). Stepping outside of theoretical jargon into the real world of one’s surrounding community becomes the key to an effective liberal arts education. He adds that place-based curriculum “aims to enlist teachers and students in the firsthand experience of local life and in the political process of understanding and shaping what happens there” (p. 620). Rather than being confined to dictatorial theoretical concepts and overly academic language, Gruenewald notes that place-based curriculum strengthens “the connections between education and the places where we, and others, live” (p. 620). When we step outside of the coined phrases and engage in true dialogue, students and instructors alike step toward self-actualized, fulfilling relationships within their community, the one that exists outside of the stultifying walls of the Ivory Tower.

How do students and instructors in a narrative, place-based democratic learning environment shape their local community? Gruenewald notes that a democratic approach to education is an integral part of developing a student sense of agency within community, posing that “from the perspective of democratic education, schools must provide opportunities for students to participate meaningfully in the process of place making, that is, in the process of shaping what our places will become” (p. 627). Within the classroom, students must engage in the democratic process of working together to devise their own strategies for learning by actively creating student-generated grading rubrics. They also must be responsible for fairly distributing the work among themselves and assessing one another on each member’s participation and production. The final product of a democratic classroom is created by collaborative consensus in which each student’s own narrative has been incorporated into the learning processes. By learning the empowerment intrinsic within the truly democratic classroom, by extension, the self-actualized learner (both instructor and student) will likewise effortlessly assume the leadership roles outside of the classroom, actively shaping the community in which they live.

Freedom in Creation

Participating in Democratic Learning Space at Chicago's "Bean"

April, 2012

But learning must not take place merely within the classroom. The place-based curriculum must be designed to reach outside of the classroom walls, and projects must take place in spaces within the community as well.  Gruenewald notes that by confining students into a classroom where they are unable to actively engage with their own community, educators limit the “possibilities for democracy…because it diverts the attention of citizen, educators, and students from the social, cultural, and political patterns involved in place making (p. 628). It is in these public spaces outside of the classroom where students and instructors will be able to cross the demarcating socioeconomic and generational lines, interacting with all members of the community, not merely their own academic peers.

By taking the students outside of the protective walls of the classroom and integrating them into the community, students in a narrative, place-based learning situation become emboldened, pro-active members within their surroundings. Gruenewald concludes that place-based curriculum broadens “what teachers and students are actually expected and empowered to do” (p. 642). He notes that rather than focusing “narrowly on student and school achievement,” those key concepts which typically confine all students to a rote knowledge base, “a place-conscious framework of accountability must begin to assess the places in which we (and others) live in relation to the kind of education that we provide and the pedagogical impact of places in and outside of school” (p. 642). As students engage with their community, they will begin recognizing the patterns that have shaped their community, and by utilizing their own narrative voices, they will record the stories and cultures that are too often overlooked. Rather than analyzing the world through the deadened jargon of traditional academia, those rote phrases which we too frequently turn, students will analyze their own spaces through a critical lens, looking for the obscure, previously unrecorded histories that have shaped their community.

Students empowered by a democratic educational space create their own place-based narrative, drawing inspiration for directing their own learning processes from either their own perspective or the perspective of a member of their local community. Gruenewald cites Casey (1996) who notes, “our experience of places is never precultral or presocial” (p. 626). He adds that our landscape is “mediated by culture, education and personal experience,” further noting that “places themselves are products of culture” (p. 626). Space, he observes, “is alive, pulsing with the beliefs, thoughts, and actions that shape who we are as people” (p. 628). Students immersed in place-based education, Gruenewald argues, perceive “the geographical relationship between people and places,” and their work “becomes the focus of critical social analysis” (p. 628). The students engaged in this pro-active learning environment escape the stifling, confining walls of academia’s Ivory Towers. By generating their own place-based narrative drawn from their own communities students will not only learn how their landscapes have shaped them, but how they, in turn, may shape their own landscapes.