Rethinking creative educational experience through pedagogies of place

This paper discuss the critical role of place in considering how the more-than-human environment can shape the conditions, tendencies, and potentials for creative educational experience to emerge. Traditionally, place-based education (PBE) has been defined as a teaching–learning process that centres on what is considered local—often students’ own “place”; that is, their immediate schoolyard, neighbourhood, town, or community. Posthumanist researchers (i.e Braidotti, 2013; Haraway, 2016) are generating new concepts, tools and methods for critically addressing conditions of glocal (Kickbusch, 1999) entanglement; in many cases drawing on process philosophy, affect studies, and Indigenous philosophy to rethink place beyond any one singular location. While PBE rose to significance in the 1980s as an offshoot of environmental education (Greenwood, 2008), a critical lens enables us to practice slippage (Deleuze & Guatarri, 1988) necessary for engaging with deeper histories and wider reach. Critical PBE (Graham, 2007) offers a theoretical framework that combines the local ecological focus of place-based education with the social focus of critical theory.

In this paper we articulate the collision of artist and teacher in place (both as institution and environment) and the subsequent intersections between people, place and practice. The authors' own acts of independent, collective and collaborative curiosity, attuned to the affective dimensions of artistic and pedagogic encounters in place, create new meanings between literature, case studies and our own artistic/pedagogic encounters. The paper articulates creative educational experiences that ground multispecies relations in an ethics of place, explicitly fostering regenerative practices for enhanced multispecies co-existence. From this standpoint, we unfold a relational discourse for ‘becoming-ecological’ (Roussell, 2020) in PBE through multi-species relations with place in specific creative education contexts.