Session Information
25 SES 08, Participation, Power and Place
Parallel Paper Session
Contribution
In the context of urban renewal in culturally diverse high poverty areas of Australia, we have conducted collaborative research with teachers and students in a primary school for more than a decade. Teachers have been exploring the affordances of place-based pedagogies (Gruenewald & Smith, 2008) for the development of students’ spatial literacies and their understandings of the politics of places and built environments (Comber, Nixon, Ashmore, Loo & Cook, 2006; Comber, Thomson and Wells, 2001). The teachers are concerned to ensure that, throughout the processes associated with urban change, their students are not positioned as passive observers, but rather that they are actively involved in understanding the designs, contributing to the planning where possible, and imagining and analysing the effects of changes to their local places, including the school. Because the teachers believed that ensuring that children had a sense of belonging and active citizenship in their school and neighbourhood was essential to their well-being and their learning, much of the curriculum was designed (in their words) ‘under the umbrella of belonging’.
This paper reports on the New literacy demands in the middle years of schooling project in which the affordances of placed-based pedagogy are being explored through teacher inquiries and classroom-based design experiments (Cobb, Confrey, di Sessa, Lehrer & Schauble, 2003). The school is located within a large-scale urban renewal project in which houses are being demolished and families relocated. The original school buildings have recently been demolished and replaced by a large ‘Superschool’ which serves a bigger student population from a wider area. With the teachers and students we have been documenting how the politics of place and built environments can become the object of study in classrooms and the ways in which we can productively explore the social relationships of place as aspects of identity formation.
The over-arching research question of the larger study is:
- How can literacy learning outcomes in the middle years be enhanced in ways that take account of curricular demands, the changing nature of literate practices and the specific needs of adolescent learners and their teachers?
In terms of the current paper the specific research question is:
- In what ways do place-based pedagogies in cross-curricular projects focussing on environmental change engage middle school students in academic learning and expand their literate repertoires?
The research is informed by relational theories of place, space and time (Foucault, 1979; Le Fevre, 1991; Massey, 2005); educational research which considers the political, social and spatial relations inherent in schooling (Gulson & Symes, 2007) and literacy education (New London Group, 1996; Leander & Sheehy, 2004); research with children about their environments (Clark, 2011; Horelli, 2006); and theories of place-based pedagogy (Gruenewald & Smith, 2008). While significant work has been done with children in the UK and Europe on their understandings of and relations with place, very little work like this has been done in Australia. Hence we draw significantly on insights from research in Europe, the UK and north America and are keen to link with international colleagues.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Cobb, P., Confrey, J., di Sessa, A., Lehrer,R. & Schauble, L. (2003). Design experiments in educational research. Educational Researcher, 32, 9-1. Clark, A. (2010). Transforming children’s spaces: Children’s and adults’ participation in designing learning environments. New York: Routledge. Comber, B. Nixon, H. Ashmore, L, Loo, S. & Cook, J. (2006). Urban Renewal from the Inside Out: Spatial and Critical Literacies in a Low Socioeconomic School Community. Mind, Culture and Activity 13(3), 228-246. Comber, B. Thomson, P. with Wells, M. (2001). Critical literacy finds a “place”: Writing and social action in a neighborhood school, Elementary School Journal, 101 (4): 451-464. Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. trans. A. Sheridan, London: Peregrine. Gruenewald, D. A., & Smith, G. A. (Eds.). (2008). Place-based education in the global age: Local diversity. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Gulson, K. & Symes, C. (Eds.) (2007). Spatial theories of education: Policy and geography matters. New York: Routledge. Horelli, L. (2006). A learning-based network approach to urban planning with young people. In C.Spencer & M. Blades (Eds.). Children and their environments(pp.238-255). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leander, K., & Sheehy, M. (2004). Spatializing literacy research. New York: Peter Lang. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell. Massey, D. (2005). For Space. London: Sage. New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60-92.
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