Critical pedagogy of place

Critical pedagogy of place is a curricular approach to education that combines critical pedagogy and place-based education. It started as an attitude and approach to place-based and land-based education (both largely considered under the umbrella of environmental education) that criticized place-based education's invisible endorsement of colonial narratives and domineering relationships with the land. The scholars critiquing place-based education mainly focused on re-centering Indigenous (and other marginalized) voices in the curriculum. In the early 1990s, C.A. Bowers advocated for a critical pedagogy of place that acknowledged our enmeshment in cultural and ecological systems, and the resulting need for this to figure in the school curriculum. In 2003, David A. Greenwood (formerly Grunewald) introduced and defined the term "Critical Pedagogy of Place." In the years since, the general ideas of critical pedagogy of place have been incorporated into many scholars' critiques of place-based, land-based, and environmental education.

At the center of critical pedagogy of place is the critique that land-based education and place-based education have largely ignored the narratives of Indigenous peoples and conceived of humans as mainly separate from nature. For example, stories of eco-heroes such as the Grizzly Man and Into the Wild's main character, Chris, center on humans attempting to overcome, or conquer, nature. Scholars focusing particularly on Indigenous perspectives argue that land-based education and place-based education should instead more fully consider Indigenous ideologies that incorporate humans as part of nature. In order to do this, the colonial constructs inherent within place- and land-based education must be dismantled. In particular, land- and place-education focused on areas settled by non-Indigenous peoples need to better incorporate the decolonization of the land and work to better center Indigenous narratives. This process can be best facilitated by focusing on disrupting the settler colonial narrative in modern contexts, considering land and Indigenous cosmologies in curriculum, and recognizing the significance of naming places and the land rights of Indigenous peoples.

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