Bringing a Critical Literacy Lens to the Study of Place in a Rural Earth Science Classroom

• In Event: Rural Literacies: Text and Context Beyond the Metropolis

Abstract

In this paper, I investigate how a secondary science teacher grappled with implementing place into her earth science curriculum in a rural school of Appalachia.

Often place-based education deals with environmental or ecological understandings of place. Haas and Nachtigal (1998) call this living “the good life” and describe the value of place as a means through which students can develop a sense of place, civic involvement, worth, connection, and belonging. In this vein, many schools that position place at the heart of their instruction, like the Teton Science Schools, endeavor to instill a “love” of place in the students they teach. This is consistent with the work of David Sobel (2004) and others who write about environmental education. In keeping with this paradigm, the long-term goal of fostering engaged student learning about place can be measured by the eventual activism or positive environmental behaviors of community members acting as stewards of place.

In rural areas, however, what if those environmental or ecological issues are under fire or serve as hot button issues for local community members? How does the relationship of place and politics intersect with place-based pedagogy in the classroom? For example, the site of this research study is home to a manufacturing plant that produces a product heavily linked to cancer and preventable death. How then does a teacher use students’ sense of place as a way of honoring their home and increasing curricular relevance while also creating a safe space for students to question, challenge, or “discuss courageously the problems of their context” (Freire, 1982, p. 33)? If we only affirm a sense of place, do we then risk making place-based education part of the banking concept of education (Freire, 1970), simply substituting “place” for “knowledge” as the deposits “which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat” (p. 72)?

This interplay of place and critical literacy guides my inquiry into the feasibility of teaching from a critical pedagogy of place (see Gruenwald, 2003) in rural schools, questioning whether our goal should be to affirm place, engender a critical and nuanced understanding of place, or incredulously both? This paper explores this theoretical nexus and discusses the particular challenges for teachers in close-knit rural communities. Like the two dimensions of emancipatory literacy (reading the “word” and the “world”), place should also allow students to on one hand become “literate about their histories, experiences, and the culture of their immediate environments. On the other hand, they must also appropriate codes and cultures of the dominant spheres so they can transcend their own environments” (Freire & Macedo, 1987, p. 47). I conclude the paper by offering a critical framework designed to support a critical pedagogy of place in rural classrooms.

Author

• Amy Price Azano, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University