Introduction
Thinking about my process of entering a new discipline or field of study, I look for vocabulary or conceptual points of similarity between the known and the new. One point of recognition came in Seamon’s essay Place Attachment and Phenomenology, particularly his term “place ballet” he says, “…place ballet may be significant in everyday habitual routines regularly happening in place…” (Seamon, 2014). Therefore, for me, there is a moment of recognition and confusion. A mentor referred to the dance form of Contact Improvisation in his thinking and writing. However, specifically to disrupt taken for granted movement, place, knowing and learning. Dance as a trope for movement in place is shared but with very different emphasis. Wikipedia defines “Contact improvisation” in this way:
Contact improvisation is a dance technique in which points of physical contact provide the starting point for exploration through movement improvisation.[1] Contact Improvisation is a form of dance improvisation and is one of the best-known and most characteristic forms of postmodern dance.[2] (Contact Improvisation, 2016).
Ballet is scripted, and rote, Contact improvisation is, well improvisational. Moreover, immediately we anticipate the potential for two types of inquiry as we extend these tropes. Place-based learning as a scholarly pursuit exists at the intersection of several complicated questions. First, how do we know and learn across a lifespan? Second, what is the best way to inhabit and or relate to our natural environment? Third, what disruptive ways of knowing and learning can help us with the first two questions? The intent here is to survey the discipline and literature through the required readings for the course but not to delve too deeply into any single facet. Also, I am not a teacher; rather I am a higher education administrator. I am enrolled in the Online Innovation and Design program and am coming at place-based education ironically from the perspective of asynchronous, online learning. So, I am approaching this newly defined discipline from an outsiders perspective and with different priorities and emphasis.
Body
PLACE
In Place Attachment and Phenomenology, Seamon offers this definition of “place” “Phenomenologically, place can be defined as any environmental locus in and through which the individual or group actions, experiences, intentions, and meanings are drawn together spatially” (Seamon, 2014). In the article, Place-Identity: Physical World Socialization of the Self, the authors define space and place as equivalent and interchangeable terms (Proshansky, Fabian, & Kaminoff, 1983). Conversely, in the article Defining Place Attachment: A tripartite organizing framework, the authors review the literature and say, “The definitional diversity reflects the growing interest in place attachment, and can be seen as progress in the concept’s theoretical development” (Scannell & Gifford, 2009). For these authors, it seems like “place” is a taken for granted. Perhaps this is too quick a move instead Schumacher and Bronet, and Schumacher add to the conversation because they do not take this definition for granted, and in doing so, they set themselves up to develop a critical theory.
Bronet and Schumacher’s essay, Design in Movement: The Prospects of Interdisciplinary Design, recounts working interdisciplinary between philosophy, architecture, and pedagogy. I will be working with two versions of their paper. The 1996 version was a conference paper the 1999 version a journal article. Both draw from their work co-teaching an architectural design course, and they had students collaborate in building a setting in which a Contact Improvisation dance troupe performed. However, long before they were able to get to the design phase, they needed to correlate their vocabulary of inquiry.
Design in movement is a complement to traditional architectural design in space. Design in movement allows us to experience, through our bodies, in a way that challenges our deeply ingrained visual culture. If we design, in this visual culture without being able to call the culture into question, we do not take advantage of the full range of design’s liberative potential: it is one thing to design so as to refuse any single authoritative reading in space, but another to discover an alternative to reading itself. We are investigating how design in movement can motivate new ways of liberative building and inhabiting that challenge the hegemony of design in space (Bronet & Schumacher, Design in Movement: The Prospects of Interdisciplinary Design. , 1999).
From this, we begin to learn Bronet and Schumacher’s specialized vocabulary. A vocabulary that I think is important to develop before we begin to understand place-based education. Space is no longer taken for granted but vexed by these two. Movement is celebrated, perhaps privileged, over reading. Reading signifies a negative return to a taken for granted type of inquiry, an inquiry that necessarily privileges our visual culture. Bronet and Schumacher offer the Hopi as exemplary of the kind of spatial participation they are seeking to understand and employ because of its disruptive value.
…”Distance includes what we call time in the sense of the temporal relations between events which have already happened. The Hopi conceive of time and motion in the objective realm in a purely operational sense — a matter of the complexity and magnitude of operations connecting events — so that the element of time is not separated from whatever element of space enters into the operations.” Hopi descriptions, to use Warriner’s terms, organize movements rather than presents a tableau. (Bronet & Schumacher, Design in Movement: The Prospects of Interdisciplinary Design. , 1999)
Hence, one element of our critical theory is to seek moments, tools, and disruptive practices that are about organizing movements rather than presenting a snapshot, a still life, a view. As a quick summary of the tension, they are trying to create; I offer a composite illustration from this article.
Evidently, Bronet and Schumacher have very specialized meaning for the terms, space, and movement. Schumacher in his book, Human Posture: The nature of the inquiry, steps back one-step more as he develops his definition of “place.”
To be in the world is to have a posture…. The root of the term ‘incarnate’ is to-be-in-flesh, and the term has come to cover embodiments in general, including the sense to-have-form, to-be-real. For example, in his phenomenology of the body, Maurice Merleau-Ponty spoke of a person’s body as the system of all that person’s holds on the world. Not surprisingly, the root of the term ‘system’ is to-place-or-set-together. To be incarnated, to have a body constitutes the order of relations of making a place in the world. As a thing must take a hold on the world, and this taking hold is its incantation it’s having a body, or it’s having a posture.
As a thing makes a place in the world, the rest of the world must give place to it (Schumacher, 1989).
Not surprisingly, Seamon emphasizes movement/rest and inward/outward in his thinking. This is in part because he starts from Mearleu-Ponty’s notion of self and embodiment which parallels Schumacher’s development of posture and place. Perhaps the most significant gap between Bronet and Schumacher and Scannell and Gifford and Proshansky et al. is the nature of the inquiry as the articles for this course are social scientific and informed by literature review. They take for granted social scientific and literature review methods whereas Bronet and Schumacher are philosophical and aiming at interrogating methods and forming a critical theory, accordingly they take more time to define their terms from the outset.
PEDAGOGY
Pedagogy is a conflicted topic for me in the readings and class discussion. There is much emphasis on early childhood and primary education. All of my experience is with 18-22 or adult learners and only a little in the traditional face-to-face classroom. I have experience training in the workplace (and the question occurs to me, what is the role of place-based learning in the workplace?). As a further disconnect (though not a necessary one) my degree program is in online pedagogy (and I do think that online learning has a place in place-based education). On a personal level, I have struggled to connect with the class discussions, folks feeling nostalgic for their place of origin and their childhood. My life took a positive turn once I read Tom Robbins’ statement, “It is never too late to have a happy childhood.” So, beginning again, thinking about my process of entering a new discipline or field of study, I look for vocabulary or conceptual points of similarity between the known and the new. In the reading; Learning to Make Choices for the Future, the authors describe three elements of place-based pedagogy, service learning, civic engagement, and place-based learning.
Place-based learning is an educational approach that uses all aspects of the local environment, including local cultural, historical, and sociopolitical situations and the natural and built environment, as the integrating context for learning….
Civic engage promotes civic knowledge, responsibility, and participation in individual and collective actions in support of the stewardship of community natural and cultural resources, and the resolution of issues of public concerns….
Service learning is a method whereby students learn and develop through active participation in a thoughtfully organized service that is conduction in and meets the needs of a community while also meeting the students’ educational objectives. (Clark, 2008)
I am intrigued by the tension offered here between the natural and built environment particularly in light of Bronet and Schumacher’s work in design, but also in regards to our participation in the online environment. The online environment is a built environment perhaps analogous to our cities though not identical. I suggest that cities, online, and natural habitats each tell us something about our human being taken together and in tension; we have a complete picture. Likewise, as Bronet and Schumacher are crafting a vocabulary to inform a critical theory that permits learners to understand as they shift from space to movement, we need more useful terms to recognize our participation in both online and natural environments. For example, we could meaningfully talk about civic engagement or citizenship in all three environments perhaps service learning as well, though both citizenship and service take on new meanings as we ask about the rights of nonhuman organisms and even biomes. We are cautious in approaching indigenous knowledge, elders, and intellectual property rights; perhaps we need a similar caution as we approach trees, a stream, or river?
In Bronet and Schumacher’s 1996 conference paper, they offer more about the class they co-taught, and it anticipates elements of place-based learning, civic engagement, and service learning.
The transformation of the project from an illegal intervention in a non-occupied, future RCCA home into an active community project was also an issue of movement. Once the directors of the RCCA, three professional dance companies, an international experimental musician, and a video artist experienced the proposals, they were taken over. A 3 beta-cam shoot was held; a professional artistic piece was edited and produced. The RCCA hosted a groundbreaking gala later as well, and three professional dance companies performed in 4 of the installations. The project took on a life of its own. (Bronet & Schumacher, Design In Movement: The Prospects of Interdisciplinary Design, 1996)
We see the three elements in this summary. This is valuable in drawing connections between the philosophical work of Bronet and Schumacher and the broader notions of place-based education. The specifics of the learning objectives Bronet and Schumacher wanted to create a pedagogical experiment in design and philosophy.
In our experiment with dance/design, therefore, we also tried to blur the distinction between the designers’ bodies and their movements, on the one hand, and the dancers’ bodies and their movements, on the other. In the main project, Dance Infusion, six seven-member teams of first-year architecture students were each asked to design an inhabitable installation that responded to the concept of movement determining space that is to space-in-the-making. The movements that determine the space was to be performed by dancers, who were themselves involved all along in the studio, as critics and as performers. Moreover, finally, the students were led, through exercises, to blur the distinction between designing and building as well. (Bronet & Schumacher, Design in Movement: The Prospects of Interdisciplinary Design. , 1999).
A recurrent theme in both versions of the article is to defamiliarize students with the ready-made space and ready-made inquiries. Bronet and Schumacher use a variety of techniques, but one provocative approach is to give students a yam rather than a measuring tape to encounter a known space anew.
So, one of the first things we did is give our first-year students a measurement exercise in which they freely chose a device of arbitrary value (rolling a yam, for example) to measure a site that they and previously designed and produced. We wanted the students to ask whether they were moving in the space of what they were measuring, or to some extent still participating in its making? Does the imagined space of the site already exist? Does the space of the building we intend to make on a site already exist? What, after all, can we say about a site independently of measuring it? We tried to make it possible for student to understand a site not as a ready-made space, but rather as at rest in order of a movement, in this case the order of movement of a necessarily imprecise measuring instrument (exactly as imprecise as pieces of wood, for example, which will be used in building on a site, are quite different from the precise lines of plans and sections). (Bronet & Schumacher, Design In Movement: The Prospects of Interdisciplinary Design, 1996)
An aspect of this is “unlearning.” We think a little less about unlearning when we think about early childhood and primary age learners – they are after all learning much for the first time. However, as adult learners developing our skills at “unlearning” becomes very important. Also, I suspect that natural environments are more imprecise than built environments and so that may be some why they are so crucial for place-based learning. I wonder if introducing inaccurate measurement and places, and notions of natural boundaries and space-in-the-making is a more tensive play of knowledge or conversely less necessary unlearning. Near the end of the article Bronet and Schumacher review and evaluate each group’s relative success with the assignment. For our purposes here, I am most interested in the groups that struggled in the middle, not those that failed or succeeded. Here we will review one of those projects called the Dichotomy Project.
The Dichotomy Project, which was most impressive visually in terms of form, lighting, and so on, could be read all at once. It consisted of two amorphously shaped, stretched-fabric-over-wood forms seated on electronically triggered ramps that responded to pressure by lighting up specific quadrants of the set…. The location of the audience and the stage like configuration of the elements immediately set up a scenario of viewing all-at-once. This scenario was consistent with the dancers’ interpretation of the space and the difficulty they had developing sequences that were not spatially predictable; we could anticipate how they would use the forms (Bronet & Schumacher, Design in Movement: The Prospects of Interdisciplinary Design. , 1999).
As a lifelong student, I recognize the death-knell of grading in the phrase “a scenario of viewing all-at-once.” However, it seems these learners failed-forward. So, as an aspiring designer of online learning, what can I learn from them? They did not vex the roles of audience-participant sufficiently but rather, at a glance, I can recognize the performance space. That error forces roles and predictability on and within the performance. Perhaps, they did not test their installation sufficiently with the dancers and audience, both in practice and in mind. We see this in the phrase, “dancers’ … the difficulty they had developing sequences that were not spatially predictable.” However, it is the “electronically triggered ramps… {and} lighting…” that salvages this installation for the learners and the dancers and ultimately for the audience.
The person-bodies were quite independent of the architectural bodies. The minimal manipulation of elements on site during layout, construction, and test-inhabitation may have contributed to the predictability of movement…. For example, when the performers figured out the triggers for the lights they began to use those, and found rhythms with one another between their feet on the ramps and the lights going on and off. The props and the bodies referred to one another, with an in-the-making quality that began to establish them as aspects of an order of movement rather than as aspects of a ready-made space (Bronet & Schumacher, Design in Movement: The Prospects of Interdisciplinary Design. , 1999).
The praise is evident when Bronet and Schumacher say that: “the bodies referred to one another, with an in-the-making quality…” (Bronet & Schumacher, Design in Movement: The Prospects of Interdisciplinary Design. , 1999). Returning to Seaman’s notion of “place ballet,” we will want to standardize the use of terms and offer “space ballet.” Returning to the classroom, we recall the daily rituals of finding our seat in the ranks and rows of desks. The bell sounds, and we stand to say the pledge of allegiance, sit, and respond to roll call… and so on. Here we see the roles of a student in need of teaching, and teacher ordering space, teaching, and assessing performance, reified by both the space and the ballet.
PLAY
Bronet and Schumacher do not explicitly use the term “play” though it is implicit in their work. We see it in the term “tensive play” which has the provisional feel that we may recall from childhood, when we would say, “Let’s pretend….” We see it when they had the dance troupe leader coach the students into a basic understanding of contact improvisation. And, in their recounting of the most successful group’s design process, a methodology of play is described. We see it as well in substituting a measuring tape with a yam. These college age learners are not children and yet play is important first for unlearning that permits them to switch between eye and body. It seems foundational for collaborative work, among the designers and between designers and dancers as well. Turning to the work of Professor Green, in her essay, A Sense of Autonomy in Young Children’s Special Places, she offers some structure to this topic.
Play, in its simplest form, consists of child-initiated pleasurable activities. Similansky and Shefta (1990) defined three types of play: functional, constructive, and symbolic. Functional play also referred to as motor or practice play, is characterized by repetitive movements performed to gain mastery of a skill. In constructive play, also referred to as pretend or dramatic play, occurs when children use their imagination or role-playing to transform themselves or objects. Additional, exploration is a type of play described as “sort of fingering over the environment in sensory terms, a questioning of the power of materials as a preliminary to the creation of a higher organization of meaning….” (Green, 2013)
First, it is valuable to the topic and the conversation to itemize and define the terms. Green emphasizes childhood in this definition. In turn, I would assert that play has a role in life-long learning. I think for two reasons, first is Schumacher’s definition of making a place, quoted above, as fundamental to incarnation, the second is Tom Robbins reminder that it is never too late to have a happy childhood. We do not just make our place in the world once and for all, as children. Instead, this is a life-span activity, a moment by moment activity. Even if we are deceived by our ready-made-readings, we can through play and movement retrieve movement and the sense of space-in-the-making. I think we need to be cautious in overemphasizing childhood development when we theorize about place-identity.
Additionally, I think taking Bronet and Schumacher’s terms seriously is a way to argue for the necessity for near wilderness experiences for all learners. Participation in natural settings particularly that are close to home is a recurrent theme in the place-based education literature. Alas, the necessary connection between outdoors experience and in childhood is vexed. Chwala points out the inconsistency in concluding that “childhood experiences in the outdoors is the single most important factor….” She suggests a much more vibrant road to development through a more complicated reading.
A close reading of her report, however, fails to support the conclusion. If the importance of a factor is defined by the number of participants who mention it, then the fact that only 42% of respondents mentioned childhood outdoors experiences that led to their concern for the environment – fewer then those who mentioned outdoor and wilderness experiences without a specific reference to childhood (49%) or school or university courses (59%) – argues against such a conclusion (Chawla, 2010).
However, if we examine the illustration above and consider the column closely under “movement,” we can see important parallels. For example, the natural boundaries of river/bank impede our progress across the landscape. “Status-in-the-making” interestingly refers to knowledge and skills for inhabiting the outdoors, what to eat, or drink, for example, and that suggests a pedagogy as well. That, in turn, leads to a natural authority, full knowledge, partial knowledge, and those in need of knowledge. To emphasize this point let us return to the classroom, a ready-made-space, with ready-made-roles, teacher, student, parent, for examples. Certainly, we see the political boundaries of school districting, but more taken for granted, the age-graded determination of knowledge, rather than the natural authority, whereby a young person might walk to another class motivated by the thought, the learner-centered thought (to use Green’s terms, child-centered, hence playful thought), “I can do the work.” Accordingly, I conclude that near wilderness is vital to learning because it disrupts our practice of reading forcing us into an unfamiliar inquiry of movement. However, as Bronet and Schumacher show, a gutted building and a community of dancers and designers (even those playing at being so) are able to disrupt ready-made readings and return a built space to that of space-in-the-making. Intentioned and clearly focused pedagogues built environments or natural environments can serve a purpose. I still hold out that the natural environment realized through movement can inspire a centered-learner to their own insights, hence giving a less deft teacher a margin when aiming to create a concern for the environment.
Returning to a comparison of Bronet and Schumacher’s exercise in pedagogy I believe it is easy to see these four kinds of play displayed in the leaning these young adults are engaged in symbolic in the dances and movements with the built environment, functional, constructive, and exploratory in the design and build. Yet I think it is unlikely that these college students attending elite, east coast technology university would have preparatory experiences like the ones we are imagining in this course. Rather, I suspect their preparatory school background was very easily in the column of space. I think play, and unlearning are incredibly important concepts if we want to craft a lifespan approach to place-based identity and education
Conclusion
I have two concerns as I reflect on the readings and the course. First, is the emphasis on childhood, on primary education and on teaching? Second, is that thirty years ago when I left Alaska, it felt like everyone was poised to make progress on indigenizing and place-based education. Alas, on my return it seems we are still talking about doing it.
I have little experience with children, my own, and my children. Chawla’s observation that childhood experiences were not necessary predictors in an adult displaying concern for the environment inspired me to think about my children. I wanted them to camp, canoe, and hunt with me and as children, they had no particular interest in doing so and they were forced on occasional obligatory family trips. My son more so in middle school as a Scout, though his ambivalence increased as he entered high school. My motive was indeed the belief that immersion was vital to them developing an appreciation of the outdoors. Rather, instead, my daughter just completed bachelors in chemistry from Lewis & Clark and a second in Environmental Engineering from Columbia University. She really only discovered an interest in the outdoors and in working on environmental issues in college. My son is a senior at the University of Maine, in the Environmental Studies program, the last three summer he has done field research, his environmental consciousness likewise developing in college. I conversely had an environmental consciousness from my childhood. In the 1970’s public TV was rife with documentaries detailing the extinction of many species and biomes. My grandfather liked John Muir’s ethic, other family preferred Gifford Pinchot and both are celebrated in California and National parks. Alas, I am a college administrator as an adult, completely burned out on gardening and chickens. I barely bother to sort my trash, and I drive whatever car is at hand, the fires of idealism are burned out.
Regarding the slow progress in indigenizing place-based learning, I wonder if the problem is that we are expecting educators to do this work. What if their plates are full? Instead, is the responsibility for this project better placed elsewhere? Perhaps administrators, nonprofits, tribal entities, or with organizations like Teach for America is where the chore should reside. We lament for-profit schools and are ambivalent about charter schools, but perhaps the place for advocacy and innovation is there rather than overburdened public education?
References
Bronet, F., & Schumacher, J. (1996). Design In Movement: The Prospects of Interdisciplinary Design. In C. Barton (Ed.), Proceedings from the 86th ACSA Annual Meeting and Technology Conference (pp. 205-211). Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture.
Bronet, F., & Schumacher, J. (1999). Design in Movement: The Prospects of Interdisciplinary Design. Journal Of Architectural Education, 53(2), 97-109. doi:10.1162/104648899564475
Chawla, L. (2010, March 31). Significant Life Experiences Revisited: A review of Research on Sources of Environmental Sensitivity. The Journal of Environmental Education, 29(3), 11-21. Retrieved January 8, 2015
Clark, D. (2008). Learning to Make Choices for the Future: Connection Public Lands, Schools, and Communities through Place-Based Learning and Civic Engagement. Shelburne, VT: The Center for Place-Based Learning and Community Engagement.
Contact Improvisation. (2016, October 18). Retrieved from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place-based_education
Green, C. (2013). A sense of autonomy in young children’s special places. International Journal of Early Childhood Environmental Education, 1(1), 8-33.
Proshansky, H. M., Fabian, A. K., & Kaminoff, R. (1983). Place-identity: Physical World Socialization of the Self. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 57-83.
Scannell, L., & Gifford, R. (2009). Defining place attachment: A tripartite organizing framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 1-10.
Schumacher, J. A. (1989). Human Posture: The Nature of Inquiry. SUNY Press.
Seamon, D. (2014). Place attachment and phenomenology: The synergistic dynamism of place. In L. M.-W. (Eds), Place Attachment: Advances in theories, methods, and applications (pp. 11-22). New York, NY: Routledge.