Creative Tensions in Place-Conscious Learning: A Triptych

Abstract

This article was a keynote address delivered at the Curriculum for the Bioregion Conference on “Fostering an Ethic of Place,” February 7, 2015 at the University of Puget Sound, in Tacoma, Washington. The Curriculum of the Bioregion Project, led by Jean MacGregor from The Evergreen State College, is a consortium of over thirty regional universities in the US and Canada that engages faculty communities in exploring the issues of sustainability and place-based learning in a broad array of courses and disciplines. This address aims to narrate a fluid theorization of place as curriculum that is responsive to the lived experience of everyday life. It draws on key moments of learning in the author’s biography and presents these learnings as three short stories. These stories try to convey and clarify how a theoretical construct such as place is lived as nuance and contradiction in everyday life, especially when we open to the experience of others, human and more-than-human. Fostering an ethic of place, the author suggests, depends on sensitivity to this nuance and the recognition of parallax.