Critical Place-Based Education, Meet Land Education

• In Event: 25.082 - Fairmont Royal York Roundtable Session Three
  In Roundtable Session: 25.082-4 - Centering the Critical in Place-Based Education: Intersectional Opportunities in Environmental Education

Abstract

Place-based education (PBE) has not always sufficiently centered Indigenous presence and epistemologies (see Tuck et al., 2014), though this began to change just over a decade ago. Critical PBE (cPBE) can be an effective pedagogy to create a respectful/accurate/unsettling context from which to at least begin the process of relearning the treaty implications of Canadian citizenship where settler futurity is disrupted, and Indigenous sovereignty is centered. In scholar/poet Gruenewald’s (2003) philosophical writings on the field of PBE, he calls for decolonization as a crucial element of education in critical place-based pedagogy. Battiste (1998) and Donald (2009), among other scholars in Canada (e.g., Battiste et al., 2005; Chambers 2006, 2008; Korteweg & Russell, 2012; Scully, 2012; Tupper & Cappello, 2008), have asserted the importance of territorial specificity in decolonizing perspectives in Education.
The formal process of education often obscures and distorts relations to place, especially with respect to land…My purpose is to contribute to a theory of environmental education that is culturally responsive, and committed to care for land and people, locally and globally. (Greenwood, 2013, p. 93)

In this work, I show how cPBE with Land at its centre are working to uncover and recover right relation in education for just Canadian citizenship. In this presentation, I describe the findings of my dissertation S-STEP research that show the importance and the challenges of this work.
The intersection between education and economic imperatives continues to have particularly grave implications for the Indigenous peoples and Lands in Canada. Critical Place-based education provides a framework and a discourse to address this. Orr’s (1992) assertion that “all education is environmental education/By what is included or excluded we teach students that they are part of or apart from the natural world” (p. 52, emphasis in original) points to the way that Canadians are educated about their connection to, and dependence upon, Land. Just as there is an absence of learning about Indigenous history and peoples in Canada, there is an absence of exposing the connections that all humans have with the ‘environment’. These absences serve the existing political economy at devastating cost to Land and people–particularly to Indigenous people–in what Greenwood (2010) terms the “eco and genocidal politics of empire” (p. 10).

Author

• Alexa Scully, Lakehead University