Thesis (Ph.D.)--Texas Christian University, 2008. / Title from dissertation title page (viewed May 12, 2008). Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references.

abstract: This dissertation examines people's place experiences more fully than has been done by others in the field of education, and in doing so, it opens new ways of thinking about place in place-based education. Place-based education, in its effort to connect educational processes with the local places in which students and teachers carry out their daily lives, has become an increasingly popular reform movement that challenges assumptions about the purpose and meaning of education in a rapidly globalizing world. Though the scholarship on place-based education describes, justifies, and advocates for turning the educational focus toward local places, it does not necessarily bring forth an explicit understanding of how people experience place. Grounded in phenomenology, this qualitative study explores the place experiences of five individuals who were born and raised in the White Mountains of eastern Arizona. Experiential descriptions were gathered through three, in-depth, iterative interviews with each participant. Documents considered for this study included interview transcriptions as well as photographs, observations, and descriptions of places in the White Mountains that were deemed significant to the individuals. A phenomenological framework, specifically Edward Relph's explications of place and insideness and outsideness, structured the methodological processes, contextualized participant narratives, and facilitated and informed an understanding of participants' place experiences. Through the coding and analyzing of interviews for common themes and subthemes, as well as through the crafting of individual profiles, participant place experiences emerged as a dialectical relationship between insideness and outsideness and consisted of Part-of-Place (play-and-exploration, cultivation-of-place, stories-of-place, dangerous-endeavors, and care-of-place), Place-Sensations (remarkable-moments, sensory-triggers, and features-marked-in-time), and Ruptures-in-the-Place-World (pivotal-moments, barriers-borders-boundaries, drastic-changes, and injuries). While the research was exploratory and only investigated a limited number of place experiences, the findings, coupled with theoretical and conceptual understandings of place anchored in phenomenological perspectives, strengthen a discussion in place-based education of place, how place is experienced, and how these experiences matter in people's lives. Furthermore, the findings of this dissertation support a proposed pedagogical method that blends place-based education and culturally relevant practices into a place-responsive pedagogy. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Educational Leadership and Policy Studies 2015

In this research, I investigate multiple entry points for understanding and developing art and visual culture curriculum to respond to the Anthropocene. Informed by posthuman, feminist, and ecological theories, I ask what practices and theory art educators might take up to cultivate emergent artistic practices with students toward responding to the geological, social, and present moment. Organized around integrating visual art into school and community garden sites, this writing includes curriculum theory, a unit design and reflections on implementation and the writing process. Using autoethnographic and visual art methodologies, I attempt to engage the subjective relational space between myself, my psyche, and the phenomenon of teaching, writing, and embodying this curriculum. Through this research, I wanted to know whether co-facilitating with human and non-human members of school gardens would stabilize affective and relational containers of care and stewardship as part of the learning environment. To this end, I found that co-facilitating with place, including the garden, is a stabilizing environment for myself as a teacher, but can also be conducive to perpetuating Western and white narratives of place. Another central theme and finding from this data was the lived experiences of grief. Employing autoethnography (Ellis & Bochner, 2000), I reflected on my teaching through my psyche, body, and emotions. I found and analyzed this data through present moment awareness of my embodied response to the experience of writing and facilitating a four-week art curriculum with middle school girls in their school garden. As an emergent response to this grief, I have therefore organized my writing around the notion of mending posthuman heartache in the Anthropocene. This is a call I believe educators should take seriously. The Anthropocene moment is in so many ways the result of deep disconnection and separation, years of violence against the planet, and against humanity in the forms of colonization, patriarchy, white-supremacy, and capitalism. I hope for this research to contribute to animating art and visual culture education toward affective and critical ecological solutions to the moment we are living in. The implications of this research are not empirical in nature, but rather take up poetic, artistic, and enigmatic qualities of the present to tease out ways of being with, working against, and creatively responding to these times in which we live. To conclude, I believe any practices that cultivate care and affective relationship to place, self, and the other members of our human/non-human communities, such as visual art and gardening practices, can serve as containers and resources for living in the Anthropocene.

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This document represents a holistic account of two years’ work thinking about place-based learning at Ye’yumnuts from a Quw’utsun Mustimuhw perspective. In acknowledging individual and collective responsibility, and accounting for the slowness of work in place over time, this document signals the need for specific careful conversations about Quw’utsun ways of being in place. Some of the topics highlighted for subsequent engagement include prioritizing Indigenous futures over settler futures when constructing and imagining Indigenous land; the need for a strengthening of Quw’utsun community engagement at Ye’yumnuts in support of further local public-school learning at the site; the potential for a deeper recognition of Quw’utsun protocols to ensure safety for Indigenous and settler visitors at Ye’yumnuts, and a nuanced understanding of visiting a place such as Ye’yumnuts in a public school-setting. This work affirmed my own commitment to thinking through the ways in which Quw’utsun Mustimuhw and their futures can be prioritized at Ye’yumnuts – how this place can be appropriately reintegrated into Quw’utsun territory and into our daily lives. This document indicates a shift in my research and personal intentions, shifting from a focus on public-school resources to an attention to the importance of Ye’yumnuts’ unique connection to its people, and the ways in which this strengthened connection will one day best support public-school learning at Ye’yumnuts and other places in Quw’utsun territory. / Graduate

Drawing on literature about place-based education and service-learning, as well as three groups* perspectives about their service-learning experiences, this research describes how place (understood simultaneously as a material agent, a setting for human activity, and a factor in an individual*s situatedness) and identity (understood in terms of one*s social position) are socially- constructed concepts that impact students* writing and learning experiences. More specifically, this project presents place-based education as a teaching method that can focus and reinvigorate service-learning in a writing course. Including place-based content and service-learning projects in a writing course requires careful design and reflection. However, course design should not be an activity limited to just teachers. In alignment with feminist research methods and standpoint theory, this research values and privileges the perspectives of stakeholders who are not normally included in the course design process: students and community partners. To present a rich account of these stakeholders* experiences designing, implementing, and participating in a place-based service- learning project, a combination of qualitative data methods (interviews, classroom observations, and textual analyses) is used. This information serves as the basis for the design of a place-based writing course with a local service-learning component. The proposed course asks students to work with community partners to identify a place-based need that can be addressed—at least in part—by writing-related service. By collaborating with community partners, creating writing products that address community needs, and reflecting on how their identities and learning experiences have been impacted by the places they*ve worked and the communities they*ve worked with, students can apply their knowledge in meaningful contexts, write for real audiences, and develop more thorough understandings of the places where they study, work, and live.

Thesis advisor: Thomas Groome / How should educators in faith respond to the reality of human-caused climate change and environmental destruction, especially in view of Pope Francis’ prophetic challenge for Catholics to take this reality with utmost and urgent seriousness? In particular, I address those educators in faith who work in and with communities that have borne the disproportionate costs of these realities. Indigenous peoples and those who live in communities where extractive and polluting industries such as timbering, mining, energy production from hydroelectric dams, and plastics production are paramount in my mind. However, I also address those whose imagination and communities are shaped by a consumer society that depends on the displacements and exploitation of the 2/3rds world. Drawing on the work of sociologist, Rebecca Scott, who identifies the thought patterns of the West as being grounded in a “logic of extraction,” I believe that educators in faith have an important role to play in assuring the reception of Pope Francis’ challenge among Catholic faithful to listen to the cry of Earth and the poor, particularly among most White Catholics in the West. In view of the dislocations of extractive socio-economic and cultural-political systems, this dissertation suggests that an appropriate pedagogical response begins with cultivating a deep sense of place. It is essential that each person comes to view their own being as grounded in places composed not only of human built environments but of land, water, and air. As opposed to the more common attitude of “care” or “stewardship” of Creation, the guiding vision of our relationship to Creation should be one of kinship. I give particular attention to the place of Appalachia as a case study for modelling what I call a critical Creation-centered pedagogy. To develop this pedagogy I draw upon Thomas Groome’s model of Shared Christian Praxis, bringing it into dialogue with place-based education. In my examination of place-based approaches to learning I give particular attention to the land education model developed by Indigenous educators. The choice of Appalachia is quite simply because Appalachia, particularly West Virginia, is my place. It is a place I love and know, and I hope that each reader will engage this dissertation with their own place in mind. This pedagogy is a critical pedagogy because it emphasizes the importance of identifying relationships of power that produce and maintain an extractive mentality. I give particular attention to settler colonialism, capitalism, and consumerism as extractive structural systems toward which education in faith must attend if it is to be a force of healing and justice. Young people engaged in critical Creation-centered education in faith are encouraged to think critically about the often complex and contradictory ways in which they are “placed” within these networks of power. It is Creation-centered because I regard Earth as our first and primary teacher. In dialogue with Urie Bronfenbrenner, I develop an understanding of the human person that is thoroughly relational. Human health and well-being are reciprocally related to the health and well-being of the “social ecologies” in which persons live. This requires that educators in faith attend to significant relationships and institutions as well as socio-economic and cultural-political systems with/in the lives of their students. With particular attention to adolescence, I examine the possibilities of Bronfenbrenner’s understanding of human development for faith development. For young people living in or displaced from places such as Appalachia, damaged by extractive systems, it is especially important that they are connected to empowering networks that allow them to nurture positive relationships with God, self, others, and Creation. These relationships must also empower agency from an early age. Young people should also be encouraged in developmentally appropriate ways to act as stakeholders within the significant communities and groups to which they belong. To this end, I draw upon the potential of connecting Positive Youth Development theory to education in faith, with particular attention to recent developments in this field that focus on youth-based community organizing and activism as especially salient for the positive and empowered faith development of young people displaced by oppressive systems of power. Education in faith, when grounded in place, has much to contribute to this process. However, this requires reading the Judeo-Christian tradition with place in mind. The Judeo-Christian tradition offers an alternative logic that calls for a conversion from extraction to jubilee. Covenantal values of sabbath and jubilee express a connection to the land which was central to Jesus’ ministry and preaching on the Kingdom of God. Jesus’ own experience of being placed in Galilee in the context of the extractive economies of the Roman Empire influenced his spiritual development and relationship to the Creator-liberator God. Ultimately, the Judeo-Christian God is a God of life and this includes the life of all beings and all of Creation. Jesus nurtured a movement that brought people into their own power, encouraging a new relationship to land and place. Education in faith should carry forth this mission by creating contexts for healing and justice in places damaged by extraction. Critical Creation-centered pedagogy involves all members of a community and to this extent place-based education in faith moves young people beyond the traditional classroom and challenges the traditional teacher-student relationship. Particularly for young people from oppressed communities, it is important that they discover knowledge present in their place and community. I address primary caregivers and families, classroom educators, parish communities, and the wider civic and bioregional community all of whom have a role to play within a place-based pedagogy. I also give attention to the unique role summer camp programs might play in this process. I conclude by attending to the work already being done by Catholics in Appalachia to seek a faith grounded in a healing and justice bringing relationship to Earth, testifying to the theological vision and ministerial work of the Catholic Committee of Appalachia. My own faith owes much to the ongoing witness of this remarkable movement, which I first encountered as a high school student. In part, my dissertation is an attempt to bring pedagogical focus to the theological and ministerial vision of this remarkable movement of the Spirit in the mountains. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry.

Schools in the United States often emphasize making children competitive in a global economy while neglecting the importance of developing citizens who are ecologically responsible. Problems of climate change, loss of biodiversity, mass extinctions and degradation of the natural environment, are often ignored. Some researchers have suggested that children lack unstructured play time in nature, have an increased amount of screen time, lack mindfulness, and are insulated from the natural world. Many children rarely have significant experience with nature's wildness. It is common for people to experience a sense of placelessness in the hyper-mobility of present times where "globalizing" agendas limit a sense of place or community. Teachers can also feel constrained by the physical confines of school and the intellectual confines of ordinary school curriculum. As a response to my students' lack of significant experiences with nature, my own dissatisfaction with ordinary teaching, and my sense that school curricula neglect ecological issues and restricts teaching innovation, I created a summer mountain wilderness art workshop designed to give 6th, 7th and 8th grade students an immersive alternative art education experience. This study explored the affordances and limitations of an alternative classroom focused on outdoor experiences, walking, art/ecological studies, and my own experiences in attempting to change the conditions of teaching and learning. This research uses qualitative methodologies including action-based research, elements of a/r/tography, arts-based research, and an ecological arts-based inquiry that involves questions about ecology, community, and artistic heritage.

This nested case study inquires about the partnership between primary school teachers and local actors within the wood industry to perform a place-based educative lesson in the Swiss region of Gruyère Pays-d’Enhaut. Five different cases relate the encounter between a teacher and a local actor and enable the description of the particularities and outcomes of such partnerships. After observing activities and interviewing the members of the partnerships, the researcher analyzes the data by comparing the cases and using a Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) model to describe the system of activity resulting from the partnership.  The study reveals that a win-win effect is present in the partnership teacher/local actor, despite some tensions regarding the role of the members. While the teacher is using the partnership as a valuable resource to create a succession of meaningful experiences for learning, the local actor is using it to get some recognition for his work and share his message within the community. This implies requestioning the role of school in society, as the institution becomes helpful not only for the young generation but also to empower the local community and its cohesion.   Outcomes in terms of experiential learning are discussed, along with the processes of decolonization and reinhabilitation inherent to the approach. The relevance of such partnership is also discussed as a tool to implement Environmental and Sustainable Education (ESE), as the findings reveal its great potential for working on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and issues that concern the local community, englobing the values expressed by its members. The crucial role of the teachers to ensure the adequacy of the approach is enhanced.

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