Place and Pedagogy

If there is one single research topic that has evolved from my work the last five years, it is the pedagogical aspects of place. This insight has come gradually. It concerns much more than what goes on inside schools. All cultural institutions are pedagogical institutions. By using place as an analytical and integrated frame it is possible to identify and facilitate good learning processes.

Why is this important? One way to talk about the valuation of community in society is to talk about place. Place is also a concept that can be used to transform our people-centred notions of community to include the more-than-human parts of community, to stress that community is created through social and eco-social relations. We live in a multicultural world where globalized, horizontal relationships and bonds between people, goods, things, images are valued more than the verticality of inhabiting place, by living in, of, and for place. I regard place as a profound, pedagogical phenomenon.