Unforgetting Place-Based Education

• In Event: (Re)Placing Rural Education: Unpacking Place at the Intersections of Rural and Indigenous Education

Abstract

This research identified what is understood as the “deep knowledge” of community/place and family dynamics held by longstanding rural teachers as a core problem for progress on issues of social justice and equity. The phenomenon of “knowing the community,” which is prized amongst many “successful” rural teachers and administrators frames social justice in terms of the problems experienced by economically marginal and racialized groups “fitting in” with the practices of school which are seldom challenged. This research reveals a key tension in rural place-based education relating rural teacher place knowledge and the challenge of complicating the ordinary understanding of who belongs in which places and what kind of education they need. It also suggests a core tension between place-based rural education in settler contexts and developing forms of education that address rural racism and respond to the calls for action in response to the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission which relate to “unforgetting” buried histories of place and nation, and creating thoroughgoing change in the structure and function of schooling.

A core problem with place-based education in settler societies is that any place we can imagine is a construct of colonial capitalism and the history of occupation of Indigenous lands (Author, 2020; Author 2021). This seems to imply that any educational programming that focuses on place cannot be understood apart from the power dynamics that have produced the place itself. Yet these histories and power dynamics have tended to be systematically “forgotten” or erased from the naturalized mythologies of ownership and belonging attached to communities. It is still remarkably common to encounter in rural communities in North America historical markers and monuments that instantiate the “founding” of a given place with the arrival of European explorers or settlers. While racialized urban conflicts have been very much in the news in recent months, rural areas continue to be mythologized as conservative enclaves of European-descended peoples. Yet, in the Canadian context, rural areas have often become flashpoints in racialized struggles over Indigenous fishing and resource harvesting rights, pipeline and other environmentally damaging resource extraction projects, and access to land (Author, 2021).

Drawing on a research project that has interrogated the role of place in rural high school teachers’ understandings of curriculum and pedagogy, I suggest in this paper that contemporary efforts to infuse curriculum with social justice, equity and inclusion principles require a significant revival and reconceptualization of social and cultural studies. In this study, elite, university preparatory courses were highly technical, rigorously tested, and effectively exempted from considerations of place, identity, community and social justice focussing on movement of successful students away from the locale and into higher education. Lower track and vocational offerings on the other hand, were more often linked to local labour markets and place, tending to focus on job-readiness, wellness, self-regulation and either exceptionalist or deficit-based understandings of social difference.

Author

• Michael J. Corbett, Acadia University