Place and identity

"The so-called Romantic aspect of a region is a quiet feeling of sublimity under the form of the past, or, what is the same, a feeling of loneliness, absence, isolation." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

How can the 'form of the past' come to persist in the present? Furthermore, how can a region, or a place, make us 'feel' a certain way? Though there are really no ready answers here, let me draw your attention to Thursbitch (2004), a beautiful novel by Alan Garner which tells the story of the valley of the same name. Here, it seems that the landscape gathers together and somehow preserve the lives, thoughts and memories of those who have lived in and visited that valley. In the contemporary strand of the story, Sal, suffering as she does from a degenerative disease that causes short-term memory loss, returns to this valley over and over again as it quickly becomes the sole place which her memory clings onto and in which she feels safe. As a geologist, Sal can readily name and classify the valley's rocky outcrops and layers at first sight. Yet, there is far more to this landscape for her. She expresses to her carer, Ian, her impression that "this place knows we're here". Ian is more sceptical, merely permitting that what appears to be a "strong atmosphere is no more than our projection of our own experience and emotion onto a circumscribed place".

Many writers on place have commented upon its characteristic 'gathering' quality. In addition, many have tried to explicate the 'interanimation' of self and world that the comments of both Sal and Ian, taken as two equally compelling but incomplete perspectives, beg us to consider. For the philosopher Edward Casey (1993, 1996), that places gather is one of the essential traits revealed by a phenomenological topoanalysis. They gather not only material things but also "experiences and histories, even languages and thoughts." Interpretative archaeologist Christopher Tilley (1994) explores how particular landscapes take on meaning for the human inhabitants that dwell there, and how personal biographies and biographies of place are intimately connected. Places themselves, Tilley writes, "may be said to acquire a history, sedimented layers of meaning by virtue of the actions and events that take place in them".

Furthermore, particular objects and features of the landscape can provide particularly compelling foci points in the lives of individuals and groups, "providing reference points and planes of emotional orientation for human attachment and involvement." (Ibid: 16) This is certainly the case in Thursbitch too, where the high stones and sacred spring that grace the valley offer points of orientation for Jack Turner and his neighbours, as well as acting as symbolic markers at which the land can be honoured, "just so long as it's done proper, and we mind us manners". The question remains however, as to whether this power of a place to gather together experiences and histories and to become a nexus of meaningfulness for human individuals and communities, is, as Ian would have it, a projection of our selves onto an inert and empty place. Or, whether we allow that place itself has a certain agency, as Sal would seem to aver when she remarks on the 'sentience' of the landscape.

In Place and Experience (1999), another philosopher of place, Jeff Malpas, demonstrates that place can be seen as a complex but unitary structure comprising spatiality and temporality, subjectivity and objectivity, self and other. He explains how these elements are established only in relation to each other and within the topographical structure of place. He refers to Proust's In Search of Lost Time to show how places have a fundamental role in forming the identity of people, and vice versa. Although places may have an agential role in the formation of identity, it is important to note that this is an identity established not only in place, but in time also. As he writes, "Proust's achievement is to display the disclosure of the multiplicity and unity of experience, and so of the world, as something that occurs through the spatio-temporal unfolding of place."

My understanding of place has been largely influenced by Jeff Malpas and it makes sense to sketch out here some more of his position. For Malpas, place is definitely not to be regarded as simply a specific region of space, defined chiefly by its objective location. Neither however, is place to be regarded as a purely subjective phenomenon, that is (as some humanist geographers have at times implied) a personal response to a particular environment that one finds oneself in. Place does indeed have all of these as aspects, but is also so much more. "Places", he writes, "are established in relation to a complex of subjective, intersubjective and objective structures that are inseparably conjoined together within the overarching structure of place as such." In the book Place and Experience (1999), Malpas devotes many chapters of painstaking philosophical analysis, drawing on the likes of Martin Heidegger and Donald Davidson, to show how place possesses this complex but unitary structure. In essence, he argues that far from being grounded in subjectivity, place is itself the ground for all of our experience. In other words, the very nature of human being, of human thought, is established in place. Place, when understood in such a way, takes on an unprecedented significance as the following quotation clearly shows.

"...the claim is that we are the sort of thinking, remembering, experiencing creatures we are only in virtue of our active engagement in place; that the possibility of mental life is necessarily tied to such engagement, and so to the places in which we are engaged; and that, when we come to give content to our concepts of ourselves and to the idea of our own self-identity, place and locality play a central role – our identities are, one can say, intricately and essentially place-bound.”

These are striking claims to be sure, and there are ones that I will no doubt come back to in future work. Speaking of which, it is now only a couple of weeks before I begin at university again, a change of place I am very much looking forward too!

References

Casey, E. (1993) Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Casey, E. (1996) ‘How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena’, in Feld, S. and Basso, K. H. (Eds.) Senses of Place. Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press.

Garner, A. (2004) Thursbitch. London: Vintage

Malpas, J. E. (1999) Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Tilley, C. (1994) A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments. Oxford and Providence: Berg

Photo is by Flickr user Revo_1599 and is made available under a Creative Commons license

Education: a journey into the unknown?

An exceptionally well pitched and timely contribution to the curriculum debate is David Lambert's recent opinion piece in the TES entitled 'Crack curriculum's core and open a world of opportunity' (Lambert, 2010). With the ceaseless pendulum of educational policy apparently swinging back towards knowledge and away from the premium put on skills and pedagogy seen in recent times, now seems like a good time to put some thought into this matter and to think beyond the usual polarisations. Actually, it is essential that we do so, to counter the inevitable barrage of what Lambert accurately terms 'Gradgrind-sounding rhetoric about facts and old-fashioned subjects'.

Lambert argues that the past decade has seen the inexorable rise of a professional language of pedagogy. To my mind much of this language has become increasingly cumbersome and is often vacuous, with catchphrases such as 'learning to learn' being the order of the day. Because of this, many teachers have become disengaged from the curriculum, which has now been largely reduced to a 'vehicle' to 'deliver transferable skills'. Yet, as Lambert rightly points out, the curriculum is really more than this. The curriculum is all about the destination, or the aims, of an education and it is pedagogy that is perhaps better thought of as the vehicle. I certainly agree. We have all heard the old cliché that it is the journey and not the destination that matters yet clear headed thinking on this matter surely suggests that destination and journey are both of much import, even if that destination is not perfectly clear to us.

Crafting a curriculum involves making choices about the selection of knowledge that we are going to teach, and this selection, as Lambert points out, is always going to be influenced by our principles, values and our 'sense of educational purpose'. Although enlivening learning with relevant topics is an excellent idea, a curriculum totally fashioned according to the latest news items and contemporary themes is bound to be ultimately shallow and unsatisfying. Subject disciplines like geography are vital precisely because they offer a world of facts, ideas and experiences that take us beyond the everyday and familiar. As Lambert asserts, there is absolutely no doubt that starting with the world of the child's everyday experience is sound pedagogy. However, failing to move beyond that is a betrayal of education's promise. Again, it is to forget your destination through a preoccupation with the journey.

The 'move towards the unknown' that Lambert refers to here is particular pertinent for me and links up nicely with my previous posting on the question of education and technology. In that post I explored what Michael Bonnett (2002) had to say regarding 'education as a form of the poetic'. There we saw that genuine education may involve a listening to 'what calls to be thought'. This means an openness and receptiveness that goes way beyond the calculative, instrumental approach that both a single-minded focus on facts for the sake of facts on the one hand and generic skills on the other equally represent. Bonnett spoke of an 'an ever-evolving triadic interplay' that involves teacher, learner and subject matter. In this vision, the teacher lets the learner learn rather than attempting to impose learning upon them.

In the same way, both teacher and learner are engaged in letting that which calls to be learned show itself. This is an intent, rigorous, and by no means purely passive listening to what we may call, after Heidegger, the 'call of Being' or 'the song of the earth'. The geography curriculum is, I think, a particularly apposite place for this kind of teaching and learning to occur. Geography, as David Lambert reminds us, is all about trying 'to make sense of ourselves at home on planet Earth'. In this process of 'making sense' we are to a large extent venturing into the unknown. Of course, we know all kinds of facts and figures about the Earth and using these to incite curiosity amongst learners does no harm, but ultimately teachers and students alike are on a journey, and education is surely most at its most enjoyable when it is seen that way.

I fancy that his journey is somewhat like the ones taken by the early explorers of the Earth. That is, we are not completely without a destination in mind. We have an inkling of the direction in which we are headed and we are not totally 'lost at sea'. This would get us nowhere, and we would blunder forever onwards, with all the skills needed to sail the ship but with no guiding sense of purpose. However, our idea of our destination is necessarily patchy; its precise coves and peninsulas are hazy and as yet not fully revealed to us. It is this element of the unknown that pulls us and causes us to set sail in the first place. As I have said before, learning begins in wonder. Viewed like this, education is all about revealing and letting things come to light. It is an attentive, open-minded journey into what is part known, part unknown.

I should add, however, that to say that teacher and learner are on the journey together is certainly not to say that their roles are somehow equivalent or interchangeable. By virtue of the sheer fact that they have journeyed further and know the territory at least a little better, the teacher is charged with the praiseworthy task of guiding the learner, and this brings with it the need for serious, sometimes difficult, judgement. As Lambert rightly says, questions of knowledge and of curriculum are something that teachers should get involved with. Just as the learner’s role is not to passively absorb what is to be learnt, the teacher’s role is most decisively not to passively deliver it.

This is why any idea of education as simply an assimilation of prespecified facts or the acquisition of general skills is bound to be inadequate. It is time to bring to an end the persistent confusion and misplaced antagonism between knowledge and skills and to think hard about the heart of genuine education. Lambert's article is a commendable contribution to this task.

References

Lambert, D. (2010) 'Crack curriculum's core and open a world of opportunity', Times Educational Supplement, 27 August [Online]. Available at http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6055960. (Accessed: 14 September 2010)

Bonnett, M. (2002) 'Education as a Form of the Poetic', in Peters, M. (Ed) Heidegger, Education and Modernity. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc.

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The question concerning technology and geographical education

In the post Heidegger and Technology we saw how, for Heidegger, it wasn't particular items of technology, nor even technology in and of itself that had led us to the nihilistic modern era but rather the essence that lies behind technology, that metaphysics of Enframing that wills to order everything and challenges things forth, including ultimately humans themselves, as resources to be exploited. Heidegger saw the work of art, such as the work of Van Gogh or of the poet Hölderlin for instance, to occasion a different, more authentic kind of world disclosure that allows things to shine forth and show themselves, free from the calculative and reductive tendencies of modern, technological, thinking. So, what consequences might all this have for our ideas about education? Is education also implicated in the technological mode of revealing and if so is there the possibility of an alternative?

From the emphasis put on examinations and 'teaching to the test' through to justifications of education that accentuate efficiency and 'economic competitiveness', it appears that there may be various reasons for thinking that education might indeed be under the insidious grip of Enframing. Fitzsimons (2002) writes that education itself has been reconceptualised as a key 'technology' for the projects of economic development and globalisation. In this vision, all the components of the educational enterprise, including students, teachers and knowledge are all seen as resources to be utilised as efficiently as possible. In addition, Dwyer et al (1988) have argued that 'schools are exemplars of inauthentic existence, and we can see it in many of their practices, such as the emphasis on rote memorization and unreflective praise of contemporary norms'.

So, if schools are indeed fully caught up in and actively perpetuate the technological mode of revealing things, is there any possibility at all for a more poietic mode of attunement to take place in the classroom? In an article that is as yet unpublished, James Magrini (2010) puts forward the case that there are windows of opportunity, particularly in the arts and humanities, to create 'small worlds apart from the oppressive effect of Enframing', in which students and teachers can engage aesthetically with the world and listen and respond to the 'call of Being'. These small but potent windows of opportunity put students in touch with 'contextual ways of knowing' in which they have the potential to see, hear, feel and 'attend to more facets of the experienced world'. This puts me very much in mind of the sort of 'Living Geography' initiatives that the Geographical Association have been advocating.

In a similar vein, Michael Bonnett (2002) has considered what 'education as a form of the poetic' might look like. In this vision we are invited to see education as essentially 'an ever-evolving triadic interplay between teacher, learner, and that which calls to be learned'. Unlike the highly controlled and instrumental way of thinking that defines the era of Enframing, poetic thinking does not conform to an externally imposed framework but rather involves a 'genuine listening to what calls to be thought in the evolving situation'. Such thinking is context-relative and expresses 'a receptive-responsive openness to things'. In a poetic mode of education, the teacher must 'let the pupil learn rather than impose learning upon her'. Importantly, this is not a wholly passive process. This kind of thinking is demanding and rigorous in its nature, for, as mentioned, it requires the learner to listen for what calls to be thought.

Bonnett rounds off with this wonderful passage which incisively captures what genuine thinking means for Heidegger, and what a poetic form of education would mean for learners, and is well worth quoting at length:

"For Heidegger, genuine thinking is not the assimilation of a series of gobbets of prespecified information and ideas, nor the acquisition and application of free-floating 'thinking skills,' but an exciting and demanding journey into the unknown. It is deeply rooted, being drawn forward by the pull of that which is somehow incipient in our awareness but has yet to reveal itself, and the fundamental achievement of education lies in learners coming to feel for themselves the call of what is there to be thought in this unthought: the harmonies, the conflicts, and the mysteries." (2002: 242)

This is an especially interesting quote because it connects with the ongoing debate about knowledge, pedagogy and the geography curriculum that my own research will be contributing towards. It would seem that the recent predominance of generic and transferable 'thinking skills' and other pedagogical devices have caused us to forget the real purpose of schooling, which is to give young people access to the ever evolving store of powerful and important knowledge (such as geographical knowledge) which can enable them to understand themselves and the world. As this quote points out however, this is best approached not as a matter of assimilating a series of predetermined facts, but rather as a continuing journey, made by both teacher and student, into what is, at least to them, as yet unknown.

There is a related question here about the extent to which technology might aid or hinder this journey. Does technology in education inherently conceal Being? That is, does it cause us to become less receptive and open to things, and more reliant on prespecified, highly structured frameworks that distance us ever more from the earth? In a rather interesting little interview on Radio 4 with author and TV presenter Christopher Somerville, he argues that in the age of the Sat Nav we have as a nation become more disorientated and geographically illiterate than ever before. The interview itself, spanning only four minutes, is short and Somerville's assertions are frankly shaky, but there are a few points made in it that can act as launch pads for further discussion.

In the interview, Somerville argues that people today are so dependent on their mobile phones and Sat Navs to orientate themselves that they fail to see the 'real' geography around them. It would be interesting to reflect a little more, from a Heideggerian perspective, on what constitutes this 'real' geography; is it the lakes, mountains and seas that lie behind the representations we see on our screens? If so, what precisely is it that makes these things so unique in their realness? Is it not possible that technology might actually help us to see, feel and hear more, thus enlivening our experience of the world? Could mobile phones and Sat Navs, creatively used, not enable us to become more, and not less, responsive to the landscape? These are all questions that are well worth exploring further, and I hope to do just that in a future article.

References

Bonnett, M. (2002) 'Education as a Form of the Poetic', in Peters, M. (Ed) Heidegger, Education and Modernity. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc.

Dwyer, M., Prior, L. And Shargel, E. (1988) 'The educational implication of Heideggerian authenticity', Philosophy of Education, 44, 140-149.

Fitzsimons (2002) 'Enframing Education', in Peters, M. (Ed) Heidegger, Education and Modernity. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc.

James Marini (2010 - unpublished) 'Worlds Apart in the Curriculum: Heidegger, Technology, and the Poietic Attunement of Art' Submitted to the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory. Draft available online.

Photo is by Flickr user Luca Rossini and is made available under a Creative Commons license

Bringing geography home

I am now gearing up to begin my MRes and subsequent PhD at the Institute of Education in London this October. Here is a taster of some of the things that I will be working on...

"The geographer Tim Cresswell informs us that prospective geography undergraduates often arrive at his university for interview expressing an interest in places and the differences between them. However, this interest is rarely about a deeply theorised notion of what place is as a concept. Cresswell argues that if students at school were to engage with thinking more deeply about place then it might not only ease their transition to university geography, but their experience of studying geography could be enlivened and their understanding of contemporary social and cultural issues enhanced. I find this an appealing argument. The ideas of place, home, identity and belonging are often evoked in the media, and are part of young people's everyday experience. It would seem therefore to be important for them to develop the capacity to think about these issues carefully and critically, in order to take them beyond the 'everyday'. This is a crucial part of what has been termed 'geo-capability'. However, more research is required in order to how to see precisely how this conceptual approach might work in practice. In response to this perceived gap, my research project will be focusing on these two key questions:

• How can we teach and learn geography in way that fosters a richer and more critical understanding of place, home and belonging by drawing upon both the resource that is the academic subject of geography and the experiences of young people?

• What would a geography curriculum built upon and led by such concepts look like and what benefits would this would bring about for learners, in terms of their 'geo-capability'?

My intention is to carry out research with young people and teachers from three Sheffield schools representing considerably varied catchment areas. They will be involved in a project about place, home and belonging. The young people will be asked to keep a multi-media diary documenting personal and shared geographies of their 'home' city of Sheffield over the period of one year. Although the group will have a high degree of autonomy over their project, it is anticipated that they will use an experiential fieldwork approach that may include creative writing, photography and the use of digital media such as online mapping and Twitter. I aim to find an approach that allows young people's voices to speak honestly and freely. My methodology will be chiefly qualitative and will include a large ethnographic component, as I will be accompanying the young people as they carry out fieldwork and compile their diaries, thus being at once researcher and participant. Other techniques that I may employ include interviewing and the analysis of media that students produce during the project.

It is important to recognise that this research will also contribute to broader debates about the role of geography in the school curriculum. It has become commonplace to hear arguments about the irrelevance of 'traditional' school subjects in the information age and their inability to provide young people with the skills they require for the 21st century. However, David Lambert and John Morgan argue that the 'curriculum wars' here alluded to are based on a superficial reading on the relationship between subject knowledge and the curriculum. I agree, and my research is located in opposition to both the idea of a subject discipline as a 'transmittable' body of knowledge but also to the 'debilitating anti-intellectualism' that occurs when subject content is supplanted by a sole focus on educational processes and skills-building. I wish to contribute to an emerging vision for geography education that integrates student experience, teacher knowledge and skills, and the subject resource that is geography. I believe that my research will help clarify important distinctions between everyday experience, pedagogy and the school curriculum as well as contribute to academic discourse on place, home and belonging.."

Photo is by Flickr user Kirk Siang and is made available under a Creative Commons license