While I found David Gruenewald’s piece more difficult to read because he made references to pedagogical experts and theories I am not familiar with and seemed to be writing for an audience of fellow experts (or at the very least, people who are reasonably knowledgable of pedagogy), I thought he made a good point about bringing together critical pedagogy and place-based education. Learning and thinking critically about the context and social/economic/political influences of a subject are important to understanding the subject and realizing that the certain events or things that we accept as being true don’t happen in a vacuum. It is also important to receive place-based education not only to get a “real” sense of what the particular space is—whether rural and natural or urban and man-made—but also to recognize that our actions have a “direct bearing” (Gruenewald, 3) on the quality and life of that space.
Freire’s words sum up Gruenewald’s marriage of critical pedagogy and place-based education perfectly: “reading the world always precedes reading the word, and reading the word implies continually reading the world” (Gruenewald, 5). Learning about the environment—rural or urban, natural or socially constructed— we live in is not an isolated activity. Understanding the environment is connected to working to preserve or reform it.
The place-based educational spaces in “Learning in Your Own Backyard” describe Gruenewald’s point. The Turtle Bay Exploration Park, Bay Area Discovery Museum, and Lower East Side Tenement Museum all serve to teach visitors about the environment, whether it’s the ecological environment of nature’s species or the social environment that nurtured a community of a specific time, and to engage visitors to be active participants in preservation and even social and political reform. That, Gruenewald would say, is critical pedagogy of place at its finest.