Photo by Flickr user The WaterboyMost of us have a view on the question of 'where is home?' We might well answer this question in the plural, maintaining that the house in which we presently live or the town, county or country in which we were born are all a sort of 'home' for us. Geography itself has often been described as the study of the earth as 'the home of humankind'.
Young people are also likely to come to school with a strong view on where and what home is for them. I sense that one of the most valuable contributions that geography can potentially bring to a young person's life is the broadening and diversifying of their idea of what a home can and might be. It has the power to take us beyond a provincial and exclusive identification with home or community that everyday experience might bestow to us, and refocuses our attention on that shared home in which we have to get along - Earth. It may also enable us to see our own literal home (our 'patch') from a new, expanded perspective.
It is in this way that I have elsewhere compared a geographical education to a journey. The following quote from philosopher Edward Casey really gets to the gist of the matter:
In this age when education is inundated with seemingly hundreds of well-meaning but often conflicting policy recommendations, it is sometimes easy to forget the underlying simplicity of the endeavour in which we are engaged. As Iain Thomson reminds us:
These days a lot of attention is drawn to making learning 'relevant', to connect it with the world of the child's lived experience. I have no problem with this, indeed, I actively endorse it as previous posts should show. However, it would seem to me that although education can effectively begin by engaging with our lived experience, a meaningful education also has, paradoxically, a duty to turn us away from our self, our home, the world of our experience, no matter how demanding and unsettling an undertaking this might be. It has to turn our heads from the flickering shadows on the cave wall, as Plato's Allegory of the Cave so brilliantly illustrates. It has to do this because it is only by completing this odyssey that we call an education that we get to return home and this view this world as a complex and interrelated whole.
This is what it means, to me, to view 'the bigger picture'.
References
Casey, E. (1993) Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Thomson, I. (2004) 'Heidegger's perfectionist philosophy of education in Being and Time', Continental Philosophy Review, 37, 439-467.
Young people are also likely to come to school with a strong view on where and what home is for them. I sense that one of the most valuable contributions that geography can potentially bring to a young person's life is the broadening and diversifying of their idea of what a home can and might be. It has the power to take us beyond a provincial and exclusive identification with home or community that everyday experience might bestow to us, and refocuses our attention on that shared home in which we have to get along - Earth. It may also enable us to see our own literal home (our 'patch') from a new, expanded perspective.
It is in this way that I have elsewhere compared a geographical education to a journey. The following quote from philosopher Edward Casey really gets to the gist of the matter:
"The home-place I knew then was not the whole, or even the essence of the place to which I now return. The movement of such a journey of departure and homecoming is from part to whole and back to part. But the second 'part' is a part that directly reflects the whole, for now I know my home in the light of the larger place-world through which I have travelled. Had I remained at home and not left, I would never have come to see it in such a different and more complete light. The longest way around is the shortest way home." (Casey, 1993)
In this age when education is inundated with seemingly hundreds of well-meaning but often conflicting policy recommendations, it is sometimes easy to forget the underlying simplicity of the endeavour in which we are engaged. As Iain Thomson reminds us:
"[T]he goal of this educational odyssey remains simple but revolutionary: To bring us full circle back to ourselves, by first turning us away from the world in which we are most immediately immersed and then turning us back to this world in a more reflexive way." (Thomson, 2004)
These days a lot of attention is drawn to making learning 'relevant', to connect it with the world of the child's lived experience. I have no problem with this, indeed, I actively endorse it as previous posts should show. However, it would seem to me that although education can effectively begin by engaging with our lived experience, a meaningful education also has, paradoxically, a duty to turn us away from our self, our home, the world of our experience, no matter how demanding and unsettling an undertaking this might be. It has to turn our heads from the flickering shadows on the cave wall, as Plato's Allegory of the Cave so brilliantly illustrates. It has to do this because it is only by completing this odyssey that we call an education that we get to return home and this view this world as a complex and interrelated whole.
This is what it means, to me, to view 'the bigger picture'.
References
Casey, E. (1993) Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Thomson, I. (2004) 'Heidegger's perfectionist philosophy of education in Being and Time', Continental Philosophy Review, 37, 439-467.
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