Place & Space
The concept of place and space has become a defining and integral element of the Change Lab.
Artist, Laurie Anderson reflects that ‘art about places is often about how we move through space, it’s about point of view and perspective and scale and exploration but it’s also about how we track these places and make them works of art’.
The Change Lab draws from a critical pedagogy of place that considers two existing educational discourses, critical pedagogy and place based education to create a framework that ‘ultimately encourages teachers and students to re-inhabit their places, that is, to pursue the kind of social action that improves the social and ecological life of places near and far, now and in the future’ (Gruenewald, 2003, p.7).
Place based education emerged through concerns of how the delivery of curriculum can be ‘placeless’, abstracted from a sense of living and being in the locale. A critical pedagogy of place challenges us to think about how the exploration of place can become an intrinsic part of how curriculum is conceived and conceptualised. This educational lens affords us with the opportunity to explore how physical and conceptual spaces can inform ways to respond, research and create. These are the three guiding principles that underpin the design and delivery of the new post primary senior cycle Visual Art curriculum.
D. A. Gruenewald (2003) The Best of Both Worlds: A Critical Pedagogy of Place, Educational Researcher, Vol. 32, No. 4.