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Wooltorton, S. and Marinova, D. (Eds) Sharing wisdom for our future. Environmental education inaction: Proceedings of the 2006 Conference of the Australian Association of Environmental Education

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Chapter 24Teaching and Place a Mutual Relation

Genevieve NooneCentre for Research on International Education and Sustainability

School of Education, University of New England

To be at all - to exist in any way is to be somewhereand 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. Infact, 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 canpinpoint using cartography and global positioning systems. Place is both physical andnon-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 inteaching; and in particular in the teaching of environmental education. It presentsdata from research with graduate1 teachers in rural schools; a study which employeda methodology based in the creative arts in order to facilitate the participants re-

presentations of their relations with place. In exploring the relation between teachingand place I suggest that this relation is mutual: to teach is to be in a mutual relationwith place.

The Arts and the Experience of Place

The data this paper draws upon was collected through processes centred around thecreative arts, in the hope that this would enable the participants in the study(graduate teachers in rural schools) to re-present relations that they had notnecessarily brought into consciousness; relations with the many different phenomenaof their place. The aim was for the teachers to tell me about this place, and tell meabout teaching in this place. However, often it is difficult to find words to expressparticular experiences of place. Heather Goodall (2002: 35 & 48) found that aparticipant in her research, in attempting to express her relation to the land,struggled for words as she tried to explain that the land needed to be cared for. Forothers in her study it was safer to voice uneasiness in terms of perceived challengeto the natural order than to speak about personal relation. While acknowledging theneed for interviewing and recording in her research, Heather notes:

1Graduate teacheris the term used in the state of New South Wales (Australia) to refer to teachers in

their first teaching appointment after completion of their teacher education degree.


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it is often unhelpful to ask direct questions of peoplewhose lives have been embedded in and dependent onsurrounding land, but who have not consciouslyrecognised this relationship ... exploring the visual isanother way ... asking them to draw their country, to map

its shapes and boundaries ... to photograph places theyconsider important and explain why they are significant tothem (2002: 50).

The data referred to in this paper was collected over the period of a teaching year,through (1) photographs and conversations during visits to the teachers in theirschools; (2) a creative arts workshop, where the teachers brought along objects fromtheir natural and built environments, and created visual re-presentations using theobjects and various other media; and (3) images, journal writing and objects createdand/or collected by the teachers.

Place ...

... as sensed and embodied

Just as we are always in place, so are we always in our bodies: we cannot beimplaced without being embodied ... to be embodied is to be capable of implacement(Casey, 1997: 233). We are sensing, sensuous bodies. To be embodied is to besensing. It is with our bodies that we feel, hear, see, smell and taste. And without ourbodies, we can do none of these. Nor can we be in place without our bodies. To be inplace, is to be embodied, and sensing. David Abram (1996: 45) suggests that it isthe body alone that enables me to enter into relations with other presences.Relations with place occur via the body. Our place relations are embodied. The bodypresented here is the lived bodyas developed originally by Maurice Merleau-Ponty(1962) in Phenomenology of Perception. He developed the notion of the life world,the world we experience, and the lived bodythrough which we experience the world.Edward Casey (1997: 229) stresses that this notion of the lived body contests thevery psychical/ physical distinction ... it replaces any rigid dichotomy of body andmind. The psychical and the physical together are the lived-body.

Its going to rainOne afternoon, in my second year atteachers college, a fellow student and I werespeaking with our drama lecturer; a newmember of the college staff, who had recentlymoved from overseas, and was filling atemporary vacancy at the college. Once thebusiness of our meeting was over we made toleave, but the lecturer insisted we stay and hewould teach us how to juggle. We both made

excuses to leave; mine that it was about torain and, as my only form of transport was my

there is knowledge of placewhich is reducible to a sort ofco-existence with that place,and which is not simplynothing, even though itcannot be conveyed in theform of a description or evenpointed out without a wordbeing spoken.

-Maurice Merleau-Ponty(1962: 105)


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bicycle I was keen to get going and avoid yetanother drenching. However he insisted that itwas not going to rain and that I should stay. Istayed. It rained. And I got drenched ridinghome on my bicycle.

I sensed the body andbody/place connectionalways already there inthe stories... I neededto repair a profoundmind/body split and ...in this lay the extradimension of body/place that I was unable

to articulate.

-Margaret Somerville(1999: 12-13)

At the time I did not know how I knew it wasgoing to rain. I just did. More often than not, inthis city, the sky was filled with clouds sometimes it rained; sometimes it didnt. Andon this particular afternoon, I knew it was goingto rain. It was not something I knew in any formof reasoning; I simply knew. I had no logic withwhich to rebut the lecturers claim that is wasntgoing to rain. I had lived in this particular city

for almost four years, and I knew it was goingto rain. It just felt like it. I sensed it. My bodyknew it was going to rain. And it did.

Even when we cannot find the words to describe our relation with place, andknowledge of place, that relation is no less real; is no less a part of our existence.

It is through this lived-body relation that we make sense of (and create meaning

from) place. Merleau-Ponty (1962: 239) insists that as we are 'in the world throughour body', and as we 'perceive the world with our body' that we will rediscoverourselves by making contact with our body. Stephanie Springgay (2004: 43) writes:

meaning is not something we acquire rather we embodymeaning ... meaning is produced and interrogated withinus (fully implicating the body in the meaning makingprocess).

David Abram (1996: 49-50) refers to this meaning making process as the bodys

silent conversation with things. He suggests that adapting to places requires adynamic blend of receptivity and creativity: receptivity to place, and creativity in howwe respond to it. At different times, our experience of a particular location or site willdiffer. In the following story my friend tells me about her move from the community tothe station just twenty kilometres down the road, a place she had visited many timeswhile living in the community.

I cried for the first two weeksit was so toughthe place was so run downthe house the land the cattle

we were both so busya new baby


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being motherwifeassistant station managerI saw the environment as quite hostile

I was surprised when friends would come out from the communityand stand on our verandah looking over the wetlands and saywowhow beautiful

I couldnt see it

even though Id lived in the local community for two yearsit was ages before I could begin a relationship with the environment at the station

Although she was familiar with both the natural and built environments at the station,and she had moved there with her husband, her receptivity to this place hadchanged. Her circumstances were different. She was a different person and, as shewas part of this place, this place was now a different place to the one she had cometo as a visitor from town. We are part of the places we find ourselves in, and as weand the other phenomena of place change so we are constantly having to bereceptive and creative in adjusting to place.

The perception of place is, however, more than just receptivity and creativity in thepresent. We bring with us, to any given place, our embodied memories of the otherplaces we have been:

moving in or through a given place, the body imports itsown emplaced past into its present experience: its localhistory is literally a history of locales (Casey, 1987: 194cited in Feld, 1996: 93).

Laurel Richardson and Ernest Lockridge (2004) write and discuss stories of places

they have been together. Each of them writes their own account of their time in thatparticular place. And although they travel together to the same locations, Ernest andLaurel experience different places. Each trip is dated, according to the modern dayGregorian calendar, however, none of the stories is able to be contained within aparticular linear time period. Each story contains memories and reflections on othertimes, and other places, which influence the authors experience of the current place.It is as if the authors need to describe other places and other times to enable thereader to understand their current experience. In a strange place we cannot butadjust and make sense of place with reference to our past experiences. We bringwith us, to any one location, our experiences of other places, and of moving betweenplaces. Our experiences of other places and our movements between them are part

of our relations with place.


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Our experience of place includes both the individual and the collective; we inhabitplaces as individuals and also as members of the collective: of communities withcertain practices and beliefs:

[place is] permeated with culturally constituted institutions and

practices. As the basis of collective as well as individual habitus, theseinstitutions and practices pervade the bodies of sensing subjects in agiven place (Casey, 1996:46).

Part of what we sense in place are the collective meanings that have been createdover time: meanings that have evolved from relations with place. Our creativity inresponding to place is influenced by our sense of the institutions and practices of thatplace.

... as relational

We are in relation with place; with the human and nonhuman, with the animate andinanimate; with animal, the vegetal, the world, politics, the book, things natural andartificial (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 21). In any particular setting we mayexperience the natural, the built and the human; the physical and the non-physical.We can differentiate between different aspects of our relations with place. We canreflect and describe our relations with certain aspects of nature, with particularbuildings, with individual people, with specific ideas, however, our experience ofplace is made up of all the phenomena we perceive; it is holistic.

Our relations with place are mutual. As we respond to place, so we affect place, andcreate place. I am part of the place I am in. That place is a different place to what it iswhen I am not in that place. In exploring how Indigenous people of Papua NewGuinea experience and create place Steven Feld (1996: 91) writes:

as place is sensed,senses are placed;as place makes sense,senses make place.

In these words Feld captures the mutuality of the relation between the sensing bodyand place. In considering the mutual relation with nature Martin Buber (2000: 23)writes about the possibilities of developing mutual relations with a tree:

It can,however,also come about,if I have both will and grace,that in considering the tree

I become bound up in relation to it ...


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To effect thisit is not necessary for me to give up any of the ways in which I consider the tree.There is nothing from which I would have to turn my eyes away in order to see,and no knowledge that I would have to forget.Rather everything,

picture and movement,species and type,law and number,[is] indivisibly united in this event.Let no attempt be made to sap the strength from the meaning of the relation:relation is mutual I encounter no soul or dryad of the tree,but the tree itself.

David Abram (1996: 39) writes of the mutuality of human relations:

the mutual inscription of others in my experience, effectsthe interweaving of our individual phenomenal fields into asingle, ever-shifting fabric ... This experienced solidity isprecisely sustained by the continual encounter withothers, with other embodied subjects, other centers ofexperience.

Not only do we encounter others in place, who in turn encounter us, but others alsoencounter the other phenomena we also encounter. Their relations with place,expressed in gesture and language, influence our own perceptions of and relationswith place. Just as the new teacher experiences her new pupils, her colleagues,parents and community members, so too do they experience the new teacher. I ampart of others experience of place, just as others are part of my experience. Myresponse to place, creates place, both for me and for others.

Relations with Place

Following are some re-presentations of relations with place, created from data given

by teachers participating in study of the relations between teacher and place.


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barkthis is off a gum tree outside the music room

and its my little piece of sanity attimes

just to look outits a little visualdeep breath I suppose

eatherits very little but very special

a little galah featherthey just come in and chatter away

just outside the music roomand I always say to them

morning ladies

between the gum trees and the galahs its likeahhhhh

sanity


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on the long walk

theresbottlebrushes andthat spiky tree that everyone hates

andan arbor thing that I have tododgearound

and

one of those sort of trees that lovesto drop its leaves

anda eucalypt that

lives at the front doorthats the long way around

I brought a selectionof the different plants that I pass on my

way to school

Ive got all the natural ones that arein the garden

I did the long walk for this one

on the short way aroundwhich is down two steps and up

two stepsI have anotherfloweringbottlebrush thing that lives at the

back doorand a palm that I didnt really

want to take any of

and this plant which stinksand when you brush up against it and you

walk into the classroom

it just stays with youits flowersseem to have a really strong odour a sort of

potency

and when they get stuck on you the kids upthe front godid you come the short way to c las s?

you sme l l

leaves


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now I dont know if you know what these areand Id never experienced them until Igot down to where I am

I dont remember them back where I grew upand they didnt have them here

a couple of times we were walking out barefoot andtrod on some of thesethings andlived to remember

theyre painful

they stick in stick in your heel

and thongs arent safe

Ive actually got some still in my shoesmy youngest daughter she often goes outsidewith just a nappy on and she scrapes her bottom

along the groundand then she comes back inside and then justrubs her bottom on the carpet

so well be coming down stairs and ouch!heel straight onto itwhen that happened a couple of weeks agoit was a double pronged oneso I had two prongs go straight up in my heel

thats something I wont forget about my place

interest should begin with the original amazement of a nave observer amazement of this kind is rarely felt twice.

- Gaston Bachelard 1994/1958: 107


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that [pointing towards the building whichis her classroom]

has been the school since 18

somethingits got it on the plaque just inside the door

it was(I think)seen as the hall as well for the local

communityits been theschool ever since

the community here formed

Ive got the original buildingright up to the war memorial up on the

wallits the most noticeable thing that everyone

sees

my classroomits a space thatI have a funny relationship with

I remember the first day I walked in hereI didnt like the space at allit just felt like a cubeit just felt cold and deadit took some months for me to sort of sit still in it andtake it in reallyit took a fair while for me to get to even start to like the spaceI wouldnt say its a warm space

I could do a lot more to make it more personal

I think spending that time in the classroom after schoolhelps to make it my space

I never refer it to as my space when Ive got a class in hereI always refer to it as our spaceso its inclusiveso that the students get a sense of ownership

of wanting to take care of it with me

sometimes I like it

and sometimes I

just dont like it


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mutual relations and

environmental education

a teacher

is in place

senses place

is part of place

creates place

The place relationships re-presented in the previous section begin to illustrate howthese teachers were part of the places in which they taught. Cathryn McConaghy(2002: 7) suggests that quality teaching is situated practice ... teachers must readinto their activities particular aspects of their place and location. A teachers ability toread place, to sense and respond to place is influenced by his/her own situation, aswell as by the institutional and social practices of that place. It is the collectivepractices of the schools and communities that can make addressing this need ofbecoming aware of our relations with place quite difficult. David Gruenewald (2003:641, 637) suggests that the curriculum needs to be connected to place. He looks tofirsthand experience with the living world outside the classroom as one way ofbeginning to achieve this, however he also contends that this is the kind of learningthat schools currently make so difficult, not only through curricula that focus onstrategies and outcomes unrelated to place, but through the difficulties involved intaking students outside the classroom. But becoming aware of our mutual relationwith place requires more than simply experiencing the world outside the classroom.

While direct experience is a necessary part of environmental education, it is,according to Fien (2003: 4) not sufficient. He proposes that learning to care abouteach other, other creatures and for the natural world is a necessary precursor for

wanting to actso as to live sustainably. He argues that without an ethic of care thatsituates humans as part of, and not separate from nature people will not develop anethic of care that includes the natural environment. An ethic of care is a creativeresponse to place; a response intimately connected to our ability to be receptive toplace. If the aim of environmental education is to develop an ethic of care thenteachers must first learn to care; learning which is intimately linked with their ownability to be aware of and understand their relation to place.

There is much literature in the field of environmental education which refers to thedevelopment of a sense of place, however there is very little discussion of themutuality of our relations with place and the impact of teachers sense of place in

creating place for students. In discussing the importance of a sense of place forpublic health, Horwitz, Lindsay and OConnor (2001) refer to a sense of connection,

teaching its the first job Ive ever had

where Ive had this chance to

go deeper and deeper and deeper into

exploring who I am

and who I am in relation to others


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sense of attachment, sense of legitimacy, and sense of community. And bothCameron (2001) and Jaeger and Harvey (2001) begin to address the notion of thestudents personal relationships with the landscape through discussing ways tofacilitate students expression of this relationship. However, with regard to teachersrelations with place, while literature concerning Indigenous teachers (see for example

Friesen and Orr, 1998) often addresses the close relations between indigenousculture and place, appropriate links to non-indigenous teachers has been difficult tomake. With an understanding of the mutuality of our personal relations with place wecan begin to address the importance of the mutuality of teaching and place; that is,teachers personal sense of place influences the way in which they create place forboth themselves and their pupils.

Conclusion

Teaching and place is a mutual relation. Teachers and their pupils experience placeas something sensed and embodied. A teachers capacity to become aware of

his/her own mutual relation with place is influenced by both individual and collectiverelations with place; by his/her receptivity to the human and non-human, to theanimate and the inanimate as well as the institutional and social practices of place.As noted by Horwitz, Lindsay and OConnor (2001: 259) a sense of place on its ownis certainly not a panacea. It is one of many aspects of teaching that needs to beattended to, and we need to develop teacher education and induction programmesthat emphasize to teachers the nature of their place and their attachment to it.However, we must go further still. Environmental education needs to attend to themutuality of place relations; to both the individual and collective mutual relations withplace of both the teacher and the pupils.

References

Abram, D. (1996). The spell of the sensuous. New York: Vintage Books.

Buber, M. (2000/ 1958). I and thou (R. G. Smith, Trans. First Scribners Classicsed.). New York: Scribner.

Cameron, J. (2001). Beyond dualism: Wilderness, outdoor education and everydayplaces. In Education outdoors: our sense of place (pp.27-32). Proceedings fromconference held at La Trobe University Bendigo, Victoria 15 - 18 January.Carlton, Victoria: Victorian Outdoor Education Association.

Casey, E. (1997). The fate of place: A philosophical history. Berkeley CA: Universityof California.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988/1980). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism andschizophrenia (B. Massumi, Transl.). London: The Athlone Press.

Feld, S. (1996). Waterfalls of song: An acoustemology of place resounding in Bosavi,Papua New Guinea. In S. Feld & Basso, K.H. (Eds). Senses of place (pp. 91-135). Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.


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Fien, J. (2003). Learning to care: Education and compassion. Retrieved 12 October,2006, from www.griffith.edu.au/ins/collections/proflects/fien03.pdf

Friesen, D., & Orr, J. (1998). New paths, old ways: Exploring the places of influenceon the role identity. Canadian Journal of Native Education, 22(2), 188200.

Geertz, C. (1996). Afterword. In S. Feld & Basso, K.H. (Eds). Senses of place (pp.259-262). Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.

Goodall, H. (2002). The river runs backwards. In T. Bonyhady & Griffiths, T. (Eds),Words for country: Landscape and language in Australia (pp. 3151). Sydney:University of New South Wales.

Gruenewald, D. A. (2003). Foundations of place: A multidisciplinary framework forplace-conscious education. American Educational Research Journal, 40(3),619654.

Horwitz, P., Lindsay, M. & O'Connor, M. (2001). Biodiversity, endemism, sense ofplace, and public health: Inter-relationships for Australian inland aquaticsystems. Ecosystem Health, 7(4), 253265.

Jaeger, D., & Harvey, G. (2001). Art, ecology and outdoor education: Researchfindings on environmental art practice in a secondary school outdoor educationprogram. In Education outdoors: Our sense of place (pp.75-83). Proceedingsfrom conference held at La Trobe University Bendigo, Victoria 1518 January.Carlton, Victoria: Victorian Outdoor Education Association.

McConaghy, C. (2002). Situated pedagogies: Researching quality teaching andlearning for rural New South Wales schools (A discussion paper prepared forthe ARC Linkage 2002-2004 Productive Partnerships for Teaching Quality:Quality Improvement, School-community Practice and Teacher Education inand for Rural and Remote Settings). Armidale, Australia: Charles SturtUniversity, University of New England and NSW Department of Education.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception (C. Smith, Transl.). London:Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Richardson, L., & Lockridge, E. (2004). Travels with Ernest: Crossing theliterary/sociological divide. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.

Somerville, M. (1999). Body/landscape journals. Melbourne: Spinifex.

Springgay, S. (2004). Inside the visible: Youth understandings of body knowledgethrough touch. Unpublished PhD, University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

Special acknowledgement: the images in bark and feathers, leaves andteaching

were created from photographs of the participants objects taken by Mike Brooks.

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