A critical pedagogy of place: from gridlock to parallax

1. Thank you to editor Alan Reid for inviting this rejoinder and to Connie Russell for her thoughtful review of an earlier version.

Abstract

Differences of perspective, standpoint and subjectivity can help to enlarge the conceptual landscape of environmental education theory. Rejections of difference, on the other hand, can become an intolerance that narrows the scope of inquiry. This rejoinder argues that Bowers’ repeated rejections of critical pedagogy are based on a partial reading of the critical tradition, and that these critiques, including his current call to ‘avoid embracing’ a critical pedagogy of place, are unnecessarily dismissive and therefore counterproductive. Environmental education has benefited and will continue to benefit from the critical tradition of which critical pedagogy is a part. Relationships and/or antagonisms are constructed through human responses and interactions. Sameshima’s pedagogical theory of parallax is introduced as a way of seeing relationships between ideas that have been thought to be opposed. Moving toward relationship rather than rivalry, the rejoinder concludes by suggesting that Bowers’ and Freire’s criticality is actually more alike than different.

Keywords:

• Bowers
• place
• critical pedagogy
• critical pedagogy of place
• parallax

Notes on contributor

David A. Greenwood (formerly Gruenewald) is an associate professor at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, USA. With Gregory Smith, he is co‐editor of Place‐Based Education in the Global Age: Local Diversity ( Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ, 2008). His research, writing, teaching, and community work focus and environmental, place‐based, and sustainability education. David lives with his family in Palouse, Washington and in the mountains of northern Idaho.

Notes

1. Thank you to editor Alan Reid for inviting this rejoinder and to Connie Russell for her thoughtful review of an earlier version.

2. See also Russell (2006) for a discussion of generous scholarship: attention to this issue of how we talk to one another is not new in broader academia or within environmental education.

3. This pattern of setting himself apart is ironic, even oxymoronic, when one considers Bowers’ long‐time critique of individualism as a problematic root‐metaphor of modernism.

4. In ‘Can Critical Pedagogy Be Greened?’ (Bowers 2003), Bowers provides an interesting ‘to do’ list for critical pedagogues to consider in order to green their work.

5. Citing Freire out of cultural, historical, geographical, and textual context is a pattern easily observable in Bowers’ critiques of critical pedagogy.

6. See, for example: Russell & Bell (1996); Bell & Russell (1999); Lousley (1999); Agyeman (2002); Fawcett, Bell, and Russell (2002); Russell, Sarick, and Kennelly (2002); Gough & Whitehouse (2003); Newbery (2003); Le Grange (2004); McKenzie (2004).

7. This was Freire’s explicit hope for his own work.

8. For an introduction to the literature on place, see philosopher Bruce Janz’ website, Research on Space and Place: http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/∼janzb/place/. For an introduction to place‐based education, see Sobel (1996, 2003); Smith (2002); Gruenewald (2003, 2005a); Gruenewald and Smith (2008).

9. The journal Educational Foundations will soon publish a special issue on ‘critical geography’, which is a synthesis of various critical theories with the scholarship on space and place. See Gruenewald (2003) for an introduction to the relevance of multidisciplinary place studies to education.

10. See Gruenewald and Manteaw (2007).

11. Two teaching journals that publish excellent examples (with more thick description) of place‐based education include the Community Works Journal and Clearing Magazine.

12. I believe what Bowers calls reforms are actually curricular ideas; education reform needs to take a fuller account of the institutional contexts of schooling. See, for example, Gruenewald (2005a).

13. This sounds to me a lot like Freire’s ‘reading and writing the word and the world’.