2008/11/01 by Jan Nespor
paper · doi:10.1111/j.1741-5446.2008.00301.x
A bstract In this review essay, Jan Nespor uses three recent contributions to place‐based education, Paul Theobald’s Teaching the Commons , C.A. Bowers’s Revitalizing the Commons , and David Gruenewald and Gregory Smith‘s edited volume Place‐Based Education in the Global Age , to examine some fundamental conceptual and practical issues in the area. One is how “place” is defined in place‐based education theory, and in particular how moralizing idealizations of place woven into problematic distinctions (place/nonplace, urban/rural, local/global, and so on) may actually make it harder for us to understand education and place. A second is how class, ethnicity, gender, and other forms of difference are addressed — or not — in the field’s theoretical formulations. Finally, Nespor explores problems of articulating the visions of place‐based education in these texts with larger social or political movements to transform schooling and environmental practices.