Teaching and Place - a Mutual Relation

Abstract

"To be at all - to exist in any way - is to be somewhere and to be somewhere is to be in some kind of place... Nothing we do is unplaced." --Edward Casey (1997: 3). Teaching occurs in place. Every teacher is teaching somewhere; in some place. In fact, everybody is always in some place; in some part of the world: 'even the exiled, the drifting, the diasporic or the perpetually moving, live in some ... stretch of it' (Geertz, 1996: 262). But place is more than just the physical location; the site we can pinpoint using cartography and global positioning systems. Place is both physical and non-physical. Place is sensed, embodied and relational. According to Edward Casey (1997: 286) place 'is no fixed thing ... [it is] part of something ongoing and dynamic, ingredient in something else.' This paper considers place as an ingredient in teaching; and in particular in the teaching of environmental education. It presents data from research with graduate1 teachers in rural schools; a study which employed a methodology based in the creative arts in order to facilitate the participants' representations of their relations with place. In exploring the relation between teaching and place I suggest that this relation is mutual: to teach is to be in a mutual relation with place.