Where Am I? What Can I Do About It?

Gruenwald, David A.. "The Best of Both Worlds: A Critical Pedagogy of Place." Educational Researcher  May 32.4  (2003): 3-12 EBSCOhost. Web. 23 Sept. 2011.

David Gruenwald, referencing McLaren and Giroux who maintain that critical pedagogy has been focused on urban places, asserts that place-based education and critical pedagogy, while not mutually exclusive, are like two ships passing in the night.  Using Haymes article, Race, Culture and the City: A Pedagogy for Black Urban Struggle as an example of place-based pedagogy, Gruenwald asserts that place-based pedagogy allows oppressed cultures to understand and to identify place in order to “decolonize” the space into which they have been forced.   He then points out that Haymes “is silent about the connections between cities and ecological concerns” reinforcing, rather than transforming, cultural beliefs about place, in particular the ecology of said place or situation. Using Bowers theoretical framework of ecological literacy, “reinhabitation” and eco-justice coupled with Friere’s critical liberatory pedagogy, Gruenwald synthesizes those pedagogies into an ecologically-focused pedagogical theory, a critical rhetoric of ecological place if you will, that is founded on a curriculum that engages and encourages people to critically analyze their personal situationality as it relates to cultures of consumption, resource depletion and renewal, conservation, and transformation.

Grunewald cautions that his theory is not just another methodology integrating the same old curriculum into a different setting.  His critical pedagogical theory of place must engage students in social change. This critical analysis of “ecology of place” has broad implications in the field of interpretation and museum studies.  His theory shakes the foundations of environmental education and field interpretation by politicizing, through analysis, how we value artifacts and resources and how artifacts and resources should be valued and by whom and to what extent resources and artifacts should be valued. Museum studies is certainly ripe for some “decolonization” and “reinhabitation.”  In an educational setting, his theory places learning in terms of an individual’s ecological impetus.   I can imagine a student engaged in learning through an ecological lens asking, “Why must I write a five paragraph analysis about a dead man’s story when nature calls and I can help write the story?”