Nespor, J. (2008) Education and place: A review essay. Educational Theory. 58(4). 475-489

This article is a review of books published by three prominent theorists in place-based education: Paul theobald’s Teaching the Commons, C.A. Bower’s Revitalizing the Commons, and David Gruenewald and Gregory Smith’s anthology Place-Based Education in the Global Age.  It first examines the theorists’ definitions of “place and place-making,” how their theories address differences and dichotomies of gender, class, ethnicity, etc., and problems associated with implementation of place-based education as defined by these theorists and informed by a few others.

While Nespor’s article is informative of perceptions of place, place-based education and many of the difficulties associated with conceptualizing and theorizing such an educational praxis, it is approached from a Western, and presumptively dominant, culture and thus somewhat antithetical to my purpose of theorizing a culturally responsive and responsible place-based educational approach.  Included in the article are considerations for shifting the for focus from place-based to “place-conscious” (p.480) in which the intent is to make learners conscious about the place(s) about which their education is based acknowledging that it is often not the place in which they live and learn, and is frequently a larger “commons” than would be considered from an aboriginal perspective; and having an ultimate goal of reducing that commons to a more localized scale.