Landscape and education: Politics of/in practices

Abstract

Education is foundational to the way we see, feel, read, interpret and ‘write’ the landscapes; nevertheless, the learning processes behind these actions are not always explicit and subject to scrutiny. This short editorial, while presenting the six papers that compose this special issue on Landscape and Education, underlines the need of combining interdisciplinary viewpoints towards a greater understanding of the issues of power, access, participation and justice that are incorporated in landscape pedagogies. Being in a university context or within collaborative projects addressing citizens and students, as the papers in this issue reveal, the landscape can always be considered as an emancipatory tool and not merely as an object of learning.

Keywords:

• Landscape education
• landscape citizenship
• politics
• practice
• awareness raising

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Margherita Cisani

Margherita Cisani is Research Fellow in Geography at the University of Padova. She teaches Tourism Geography: Heritage and Sustainability as part of the MA degree in Tourism Culture Sustainability. Her research interests span across landscape and mobilities studies, with particular attention to their reciprocal influences in everyday landscapes and non-motorized practices of mobility, in tourism landscapes, as well as in education and citizenship engagement.

Benedetta Castiglioni

Benedetta Castiglioni is Associate Professor in Geography, representative of the University of Padua for UNISCAPE, chair of the MA degree in Landscape Studies, she is author of several publications and volumes dedicated to landscape from a geographical perspective. Her research deals with the social dimension of landscape, focussing especially on the issues of education, democracy and citizenship participation.

Anne Sgard

Anne Sgard is Professor of Geography at the University of Geneva. She teaches political and cultural geography at the Department of Geography and geography didactics at the Institute of Teacher Education. She specialises in the analysis of landscape policies, mobilisation for landscapes and mediation practices. In 2014 she created the international research group ‘Landscape Didactics’, which brings together teacher-researchers in geography and landscape architecture from Switzerland, France, Belgium and Canada.