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The strong poetry of place: a co/auto/ethnographic journey of connoisseurship, criticality and learning

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Tricia Kress at Molloy College
Tricia Kress
Robert Lake
Robert Lake
Robert Lake
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Abstract

Through a co/auto/ethnographic approach informed by a theoretical bricolage of critical pedagogy, place-based education, science education, human geography, feminism, and indigenous ways of knowing, the authors demonstrate the power of place in and as pedagogy. Using rich personal narratives, they reclaim their stories as an urban island-dweller and nomadic music-dweller, and they illuminate place as an epistemological, ontological and axiological anchor for the Self in the neoliberal wasteland. Specifically, the authors attend to their familial lineages and reasons for migrating from Southern Europe to the USA’s Northeast section, the Northern Mid-Western and to the Southeast. They examine their and their families’ connections with place in relation to the ideological fictions embedded within their shared narrative of “for a better life,” which is the story that was told to them about their families’ migrations. They probe under the surface by asking, “better than what,” “according to whom,” and “why?” In doing so, they peel back the veil of hegemony and expose the ways that economic disadvantage impacted their families’ relationships with their homelands. The article concludes by conceptualizing critical connoisseurship as a means for guiding students to tap into the embodied knowledge of place in order to notice, question, appreciate and critically reflect upon curricular content and subject matter and resist neoliberalism’s removal of person from place and local knowledge.
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ORIGINAL PAPER
The strong poetry of place: a co/auto/ethnographic
journey of connoisseurship, criticality and learning
Tricia M. Kress
1
•Robert Lake
2
Received: 26 August 2016 / Accepted: 22 December 2016 / Published online: 6 October 2017
Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017
Abstract Through a co/auto/ethnographic approach informed by a theoretical bricolage of
critical pedagogy, place-based education, science education, human geography, feminism,
and indigenous ways of knowing, the authors demonstrate the power of place in and as
pedagogy. Using rich personal narratives, they reclaim their stories as an urban island-
dweller and nomadic music-dweller, and they illuminate place as an epistemological,
ontological and axiological anchor for the Self in the neoliberal wasteland. Specifically, the
authors attend to their familial lineages and reasons for migrating from Southern Europe to
the USA’s Northeast section, the Northern Mid-Western and to the Southeast. They
examine their and their families’ connections with place in relation to the ideological
fictions embedded within their shared narrative of ‘‘for a better life,’’ which is the story that
was told to them about their families’ migrations. They probe under the surface by asking,
‘‘better than what,’’ ‘‘according to whom,’’ and ‘‘why?’’ In doing so, they peel back the veil
of hegemony and expose the ways that economic disadvantage impacted their families’
relationships with their homelands. The article concludes by conceptualizing critical con-
noisseurship as a means for guiding students to tap into the embodied knowledge of place in
order to notice, question, appreciate and critically reflect upon curricular content and subject
matter and resist neoliberalism’s removal of person from place and local knowledge.
Keywords Critical pedagogy Place-based education Co/auto/ethnography Human
geography Connoisseurship
Lead Editor: Alejandro J. Gallard M.
&Tricia M. Kress
Tricia.kress@umb.edu
Robert Lake
boblake@georgiasouthern.edu
1
College of Education and Human Development, The University of Massachusetts Boston, 100
Morrissey Blvd., W-1-77, Boston, MA 02125, USA
2
Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA, USA
123
Cult Stud of Sci Educ (2018) 13:945–956
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-016-9804-y
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.
... Using TEK, the EBCI and other Indigenous societies communicate their authoritative environmental knowledge through their transcendent relationships with their local outdoor environments (Cherokee Preservation Foundation, 2014;McKeon, 2012). Collaborative experiences with Indigenous storytelling can instruct participants about interdependence with natural environments, and increase their factual reasoning in environmental consciousness (Datta, 2018;Goings, 2016;Kress & Lake, 2018). By examining the place-based properties, symbols, and members of an outdoor environment, the interdisciplinary processes and reciprocity of related TEK are defined for students (Gruenewald, 2003;Nesterova, 2020;Sepie, 2017). ...
... The theme of well-being evolved through the students' understandings of the TEK stories and their support of human engagement with nature. As they reflected on the narratives, one participant expressed the realities of human dependency on nature to sustain life "so I do not die" and another explained, "if you need help you could always ask nature" (Datta, 2018;Goings, 2016;Kress & Lake, 2018). These relational benefits to humans extended to the outdoor environment, according to a student's discussion of the TEK because people should be "taking care of all the land around you" (Nesterova, 2020). ...
... The participants' interpretations indicate how the agency of a TEK can potentially synergize knowledge, skills, and relationships through a holistic collaboration with place-based lessons and a local ecological system (Gruenewald, 2008;Nesterova, 2020;Sabet, 2018). Blending these elements can define and inform the strategies necessary for ongoing sustainability that interdependent relationships with outdoor environments require (Kress & Lake, 2018;Vander Ark et al., 2020). By fostering increasing connections about local systems in nature for placebased educative practices through the affirmative inclusion of Indigenous TEK and narratives, contemporary environmental consciousness can be fostered (Nesterova, 2020;Ronen & Kerret, 2020;Sobel, 2014). ...
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