Place-Making Through Reenactment: From Archives to Urban Spaces

• In Event: Pedagogical Spaces and Places for Teacher and Student Agency

Abstract

We study the learning of youth as they moved across archival and urban spaces and told a spatial story about the city’s past. We reconceptualize “place-based education” as a more active process of place-making, emphasizing learners’ mobility within and across places as both the content and process of learning. We found reenactment activities embedded in spatial storylines to be powerful forms of place-making, opening opportunities for participants to make visible a “critical pedagogy of place” (Gruenwald, 2003) as they bridged multiple layers of space, time, and culture. This study provides evidence that learning environment designs informed by place-making may (a) foster broadly accessible contexts for and forms of teaching and learning and (b) contain possibilities for diverse meaning potentials.

Authors

• Lara Heiberger, Vanderbilt University - Peabody College

• Rogers P. Hall, Vanderbilt University