Selecting the Clay: Theorizing Place-based Mathematics Education in the Rural Context (Interview with David Gruenewald)

Interviewer: Craig Green

As a craftsman potter can tell you, the makeup of the beginning clay determines the quality of the final product. One of the founding ideas of the ACCLAIM program is to seek out teaching and learning opportunities that contribute to the success of teachers and students in their rural settings. Place-based mathematics education is seen as one of those promising opportunities. The purpose of this article is to continue finding the “beginning clay” of what is place-based mathematics education. To help move consideration of place-based mathematical instruction from the study of something that seems to be more an idea than a researchable practice, many of those involved with ACCLAIM  believe a main ingredient should be a grounding of theory in critical pedagogy of place (CPOP)

The following article is an interview with an emerging proponent of CPOP, Dr. David Gruenewald of Washington State University. Dr. Gruenewald lives in eastern Washington, just on the edge of the Idaho panhandle.  His scholarship, teaching, and community work focus on deepening the theory and practice of place-conscious education. Gruenewald currently has two books forthcoming from Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: Place-Conscious Education and Place-Based Education in the Global Age (edited with Gregory Smith.)  The interviewer is Craig Green, third year member of ACCLAIM cohort I.

Craig:  Where did your interest in “place” come from?

David: When I was in graduate school, the people I learned with were either critical theorists or change agents for social justice.  None of them, however, paid much attention to the environment in their analysis of culture.  This seemed then, and remains, a major omission and a troubling silence in most critical social theory.  The emphasis I bring to my study of critical theory and social change is a passion for the land.  Fortunately, I had mentors who supported this passion, especially when I began to examine the obvious but overlooked connections between the colonization of people and the colonization of the land.  “Landscape” was actually the first term I settled on to try to describe the socio-ecological contexts of education that interest me.  In fact, “reading the landscape” was an early title for my dissertation.  It’s a phrase I borrowed from my work with Cliff Knapp and the Leopold Education Project in the early 1990s.  But the further I went into this idea of reading the cultural as well as the ecological landscape, the more this concept of “place” kept popping up, in anthropology, philosophy, literature, natural history, ecology, geography, sociology, health, psychology, and so on—especially critical geography.  I soon discovered that “place” was a construct that many people and disciplines embraced because of its relevance in describing the immediate contexts of our lives.  Education discourse had begun to recognize place, but it hadn’t yet begun to explore the many ways that these other conversations about place challenge the very meaning of education.

Craig: You advocate combining critical pedagogy and place-conscious education, and point out that one is argued more by urban educators and one more by rural educators.  Why is that?

David: One of the biggest paradoxes of critical pedagogy [CP] is that while it began with Freire in rural Brazil and other rural “Third World” places, it has come to be associated mainly with the North American urban multiculturalism of Peter McLaren and Henry Giroux.  The fact is that there are many urban educators, if not educational theorists, who do embrace place-based education.  They may not use the term, but they draw heavily upon places for curriculum.  Community-based education, where the community becomes a text for inquiry and social action, is a common theme in many urban areas.  Still, critical pedagogy in the U.S. does seem to speak mainly to urban educators and mainly neglects place.  Stephen Haymes’ work is a notable exception.  The reason for the urban appeal of CP, I believe, is that it is very explicit about issues of diversity in terms of race, class, gender, disability and other categories of “otherness,” and very explicit about the power dynamics that operate on the level of culture, community, and identity.  Overall, these power dynamics are much more visible and in-your-face in urban settings than they are in rural.  Critical pedagogy is simply the dominant educational tradition that critically explores issues of power.  But this is paradoxical too.  According the Rural School and Community Trust, rural African Americans are more likely to live in poverty then urban African Americans.  In other words, issues of race and class are just as palpable in rural places are they are in urban.  My guess is that critical pedagogues have tended to neglect place because educators who embrace place have tended to sidestep issues of difference and power.  This is why it is so important for place-based education to borrow from other place-conscious traditions, critical geography for example, that do examine issues of power and cultural politics.

Craig: What issues do you have with the traditional critical pedagogy of Freire, Giroux, and McLaren?

David: Chet Bowers, of course, has for a long while been pointing out what he believes to be fundamental and unredeemable flaws with critical pedagogy.  These are very important and insightful critiques that can be found in almost all of Bowers’ voluminous work.  Just as I have great respect for this critical work, I have great respect for the critical pedagogy of Freire, Giroux, and McLaren.  But like most social theorists, these particular critical pedagogues mainly ignore the land, the total ecological places where others and we live.  Unlike Bowers, however, I believe that critical pedagogy can and should be “greened” and redeemed.  The best evidence I can point to here is the great work done by critical pedagogues John Huckle and Steven Sterling in Britain, and John Fien and Ian Robottom in Australia.  Ed O’Sullivan in Canada is another example.  Their writings on sustainability and transformative education demonstrate an integrated approach to critical pedagogy and ecological conscience.  Critical educational perspectives are not static, nor do three famous critical pedagogues represent the entire tradition.  For me the important question is whether and how we pay attention to the cultural and the ecological dimension of places.  This is a problem that I hope to approach in alliance with a diverse representation of other critical educators.

Craig: Why do you prefer "place-conscious education” to "place-based education"?

David: I use both phrases interchangeably.  Place-conscious is a more powerful phrase because it suggests that not to be place conscious is to remain unconscious toward places.  It is this unconsciousness that I want to interrupt and wake up from.  Also, “place-based” seems to indicate just another educational method or technique, when, in fact, I think that as an emerging movement it connotes a whole new way, or very old way, of being conscious about the purpose and process of education.  However, Sam Lyman, a doctoral student I work with, constantly reminds me that some practitioners are more comfortable with PBE as a method than PBE as a movement.  Maybe that’s why I embrace both terms.  Sometimes PBE needs to be discussed as a methodology that is doable within the context of schooling, and not as a movement that challenges schooling at its core.  In addition, place consciousness is a term that suggests a consciousness of other traditions, such as geography, that have much to teach educators about the power of place to describe the complexity of lived experience.  And also, place consciousness indicates a consciousness of other places and, potentially, creates a link between local and global study.

 Craig:  What is the main difference between the Social Reconstructivism Movement lead by George Counts and Harold Rugg in the 1930’s and the idea of critical pedagogy of place?

David: The 20^th century traditions of reconstructionism, progressivism, and radicalism in education all suggest elements of a place-based approach.  Theodore Brameld, one of the leaders of social reconstructivism, was a big supporter of a large part of the learning happening outside of school and in the community.  Someone should do a detailed historical analysis of the relationship between these earlier movements and PBE.  This would be valuable work.  For example, I’d like to know why, despite all the energy behind these movements, schools look pretty much the same as they always have.  In other words, these earlier movements have largely failed to transform schooling.  I don’t know if PBE can transform schooling as an institution, but I do believe that schooling needs to be rethought, and rethought not just in terms of earlier movements and traditions, but in terms of the current historical moment—the one dominated like never before by standardization and the market mentality of the global economy.  The global economy and the complexities of globalization have turned people’s attention away from place, perhaps even away from life.  A critical pedagogy of place begins by recognizing this problem and then suggests critical questions for educators everywhere.  What about this place needs to be changed or transformed?  What about this place needs to be conserved, restored, or created?  How might education and schooling play a role in posing and responding to these questions? 

Craig: Native American educators advocate a “culture-based” education.  How do you see that as distinct from a “place-conscious” education?

David: With respect to some indigenous communities, these may be nearly synonymous terms.  Overall, however, I see place as a concretization of the abstract notion of culture common in educational discourse.  In my state of Washington, “culturally-responsive teaching” has become another educational slogan, one that is used as a cheer for teaching for higher test scores.  The story goes like this: if teachers can use pedagogy appropriate to a student’s home culture, and draw upon a student’s cultural funds of knowledge in the curriculum, then the student will achieve more in traditional school measures.  Is this being responsive to culture?  To what in culture should we as educators be responsive?  Place is a good place to begin looking for answers to this.

But your question raises for me an important distinction between education and schooling.  Schooling has and continues to be an instrument of colonization that like other social institutions serves the interests of those in power better than those without.  Thus, indigenous scholars such as Madhu Suri Prakash, speak of “escaping education,” or escaping schooling, as an appropriate response for some indigenous peoples.  However, this is not a realistic option for most Native American youth, or White, Latino and African-American, who attend public schools in the U.S.  The problem then becomes how to honor Native and local cultures, places, and traditions in a system of schooling that have historically done so much damage to culture, places, and traditions.  I’m still wondering, somewhat pessimistically, if this is possible.  The Alaska Native Knowledge Network, though, has in the past two decades made great strides in this direction.  Their vision of culturally responsive teaching and culturally responsive schools is a positive example of the institutionalization of place-based education in a large and diverse region inhabited by diverse Native peoples.  Culturally responsive and place-based educators can learn a lot from indigenous educational traditions worldwide, which have, of course, always been intertwined with place.  The purposes of these traditions, however, are so different from the purposes of schooling.  I’m reminded of Greg Cajete’s great book, Look to the Mountain.  In this “ecology” of indigenous education, Cajete says that education is “for life’s sake.”  This just doesn’t mix well with the grammar of schooling, the culture of accountability that dominates schools.  In a sense, one of the goals of place-conscious education is how—to use Wes Jackson’s phrase—to become native to a place, for life’s sake.  That is, place-based education is for everyone; everyone has the right and the responsibility to know, to belong to, and to live well to the places he or she inhabits.

Craig:  Some writers have elaborated the idea of "the commons," indicating objects or ideas to which everyone has access.  Where does place-conscious education intersect "the commons," in your view?

David: Like place, the commons is a powerful term—potentially more concrete and palpable than culture.  I view it as another productive synonym.  Just last year I proposed the title of a new journal—Commonplace.  I’m still looking for a publisher.  There is significant scholarship and activism around the commons that can highlight issues important to place.  For example, there is tension between private and public space and the responsibility of citizens and leaders to act for the common good.  At many different scales, we can ask questions about the tragedy of the commons and how they might be prevented or ameliorated.  One of the more powerful concepts associated with the commons is that of enclosure.  Chet Bowers has been writing about this and has a book out or on the way.  Enclosure can mean privatization and lack of public access to places, but it can also mean increasing restriction on what one is able to do or think.  I don’t think it is a stretch to claim that state-sponsored “government” education in the U.S. acts as an official system of enclosure on what people ought to learn, know, and do.  The more scripted the standards and testing movement becomes, the less access teachers and students have to experiences outside the script.  It is not that the script is inherently all that bad, but there are major opportunity costs that come with increased regimentation.  These of course are rarely counted, quantified, or even acknowledged.  Why?  Because we have been enclosed by an education that makes it hard to see beyond the familiar fences.

Craig: What have you been reading lately and is there a connection to place?

David: Children’s books.  My wife Jill and I have three wonderful kids—Eli, Kate, and Ivy—and very little time to read for us, especially inside our home.  But another doctoral student I work with, Mira Reisberg, is an artist and a children’s book illustrator.  We’ve been doing some writing about place and multicultural children’s books; her dissertation, I believe, will be a real contribution on this theme.  Traditionally, kids might learn something about “setting” as a literary device from these books, but a focus on place promises so much more.  Even very young children can begin to experience the Freirian act of reading the word and the world, or connecting education to lived experience.  Again, this is the power of place.  I think it can bring a whole new experiential dimension to early literacy experiences.  I’m excited by what others like Mira are doing with the concept.

Craig: What do you think about the social use of mathematics, per se—in the sense of its contributions to technology, business, and the influence of that usage on rural communities in particular?

David: Talk about changing the subject!  When I was in first grade, I was identified as good at math.  I liked math and did well all through school and college.  It made me feel smart.  It even made me feel smarter and thus better than others.  This sense of superiority is the cousin to the sense of inferiority people experience when they do poorly in math or other school subjects.  Much has been said about the damage done, especially to girls, from doing poorly in math.  But I think the sense of superiority I felt is just as bad.  It separated me from others, and it pitted me against my peers in a constant competition for high test scores.  During my junior year of high school, it even drove me to cheating.  Our pre-calculus teacher, Mr. Yaeger, gave the same tests year after year and several of us found them to be excellent study guides!  The measure of success in math and upper-level science courses was always a number—the closer to 100 the better.  The mainly tacit background of this competition—and it was fierce at times—was that success in math and science would lead to future success in college and in the technology job market.  I was going to be an engineer, make some real money.  This for me was the social use of mathematics—it was a vehicle for social promotion in a highly competitive and individualistic climate.

The social uses you suggest—contributions in technology and business—have clearly brought many benefits to people, though such benefits are experienced unevenly and also have related and mainly overlooked costs.  As Bowers has written, technology amplifies some aspects of culture and reduces or diminishes others.  Perhaps the question for any community—urban or rural—is how to mediate and guide the impact of technology and business so that it enhances the quality of community life.  I have no doubt that math has a role to play in answering that question.  But it is a moral and social problem, not a mathematical one.

Craig:  ACCLAIM is supportive of the idea of a place-conscious mathematics education in rural schools, but few people have really imagined what that might look like.  What do you think is needed to engage in this work?

David: For the last four years I have been teaching PBE to undergraduate and graduate secondary teacher education students in all content areas.  Math has been the most difficult school subject for me to get excited about with these students from the perspective of place.  While I have found some good examples of place-based math, most of them, such as Eric Gutstein’s, focus on a middle school level.  My students, on the other hand, often imagine themselves teaching pre-calculus and calculus to juniors and seniors.  They are often intrigued by the real-world problem solving approach of PBE, but they are also keen on preparing the AP kids.  These upper-level classes tend to mirror undergraduate math in skill development and leave little room for experimentation and collaboration with other subjects.  As long as the purpose of high school math is to prepare for or mirror the undergraduate math curriculum—and there is a new push to retool high school math for college readiness—the space for place will be limited.  And as long as place-based approaches to math happen mainly in low tracks or basic levels, place-based math will probably carry a stigma associated with remediation.

My former colleague and math educator Gary Davis, who is now at Dartmouth, used to talk at me excitedly about mathematical dilemmas that I’d try my best to follow.  Now, he was not at all interested in place, but he would frequently ask, why teach math anyway?  To which I would respond, why teach anything anyway?  These are the kind of conversations we need more of among a diverse group of educators from different disciplines.

Another friend of mine, Doug Burke, is a famous set theorist at UNLV.  He studies “infinity” and admits that there will never be any application for his work outside of the theoretical ether.  He even told me once that there are only a handful of people in the world who really understand, or care about, his work.  All day he sits around with his pen and his yellow pad scribbling exotic equations.  He also likes wrestling and weight lifting.  He reminds me that some things can and probably should be studied just for themselves.  Of course, he is an elite case, sort of the Michael Jordan of math.  He isn’t what Bob Moses has in mind teaching algebra to African American middle school kids.  For Moses, math literacy is a social justice issue because it is the gateway to higher education.  I’m not going to argue with that, except to point out that on the surface it is essentially the same argument George Bush has repeated in his campaign to leave no child behind.

PBE is happening all over the world, but I don’t think that it has much of a chance scaling up in U.S. public schools, especially in math, until teachers and educational leaders begin to ask fundamental questions about the purposes of education and its relationship to the places where we, and others, live.  Currently, the explicit purpose of our education curriculum is to develop a standard set of skills or performances in fragmented content areas like math.  This we are told will benefit individuals and society.  But teachers who implement PBE do so because they hold themselves accountable to other standards beyond those scripted in state codes or national professional organizations.  They believe, for example, that children and youth should have direct experiences studying and participating in community life.  I guess the question is, do math educators believe this, and, if so, what are they doing about it?  What can and is being done to begin these conversations?  Maybe our dialogue is a small part of this process.

Craig: Could place-conscious education work on a micro level (a single classroom) and, as well, on a macro level (school or system-wide)?

David: I am aware of few examples of a school-wide embrace of PBE.  It can happen, but it takes a dedicated staff of leaders willing and able to rethink schooling and willing and able to engage with their local communities.

Craig:  In your writings, you seem skeptical about the movement to align environmental education (EE) curriculum with the standards and testing movement. Do you see potential problems with rural mathematics educators who attempt to honor the place and honor the mathematics (with attention to rigor)? Are standards and “place” compatible?

David: In terms of the meaning of words, standard and place are contrary and conflicting terms.  Place is about uniqueness and difference.  Standard is about sameness and uniformity.  So, on this and other levels I think they are incompatible.  Here’s an interesting fact:  the Oxford English Dictionary’s first entry for the word standard is “a flag… or other conspicuous object, raised on a pole to indicate the rallying point of an army.”  This is interesting to me, because of the historical relationship between educational standardization and military and economic competition.  At the level of national policy, the first wave of higher standards, especially in math and science, was touted as an effort to secure military dominance in response to Sputnik and the cold war.  The second, current wave, which has grown into a tsunami, has been touted as an effort to secure economic dominance in response to the globalized economy.  And as Noam Chomsky keeps trying to tell us, U.S. economic and military policy are intimate bedfellows.  In this context, I think that standards promote education about as well as bombs promote democracy.

The standards are so deeply entrenched in schooling that even questioning them has become taboo.  I guess we’re supposed to salute and keep our thoughts to ourselves.  Many of my friends tell me that it’s not the standards but the tests that are bad. But these two systems tend to work together.  And it’s not a particular standard or test that causes problems.  It is the way that the discourse of standards and testing now over-determines what happens in schools and the way that this discourse stands in the way of other possibilities.

My issue with what I call “the ritual of alignment” is that it really confuses means and ends.  That is, when educators “align” the curriculum they want to develop—whether it’s environmental education, education for social justice, or PBE—with the standards in the content areas, the curriculum becomes an instrumental means to meet the end of the standard, another teaching “method,” at risk, perhaps of being construed as “best practice” for the wrong reasons.  As long as the true measure of legitimacy remains the standards and their associated assessments in fragmented content areas like math, place-based pedagogies will be seen as a novel means to the same problematic ends.  I have been involved in several of these rituals myself, and I have witnessed the act of aligning curriculum to standards reinforcing the power of the standards and testing to control the minds and work of educators.  Greater efficiency in meeting standards and the promise of better test scores are not the purposes of PBE.

Many of my colleagues believe that these acts of curricular alignment are simply pragmatic and strategic necessities given the problem of accountability.  I agree.  But an irresistible voice calls me away from all that.  I believe, as I believe they do, that the power and dominance of standards and testing, sometimes called “rigor,” needs to be seriously questioned, strategically resisted, and ultimately transformed.  It may be a simplistic dichotomy, but I think that we can either reinforce the standards and testing movement with our compliance, or problematize and transform it with our resistance.  If educators truly believe that their environmental, social justice, or place-based curricula have value, why do we feel the need to justify it in terms of mandated standards that lack a real vocabulary for things like social justice and community well-being? 

Probably most of us in education, being institutionalized, suffer from varying degrees of fear and internalized surveillance and oppression, which makes people want to shield and protect themselves from judgment and censure and at the same time seek external validation.  But there is another problem here having to do with opportunity costs.  The ritual of alignment can also become a huge waste of time—misplaced emphasis that might be better spent on creative teaching, or on reflecting on the purposes of teaching and how poorly many of these are met though content-area standardization.  How much effort is wasted preparing to perform and performing for NCATE [National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education—Ed.], not to mention the test preparation common in schools today?

This does not mean that I don’t find value in some of the existing standards or that I object to quality criteria.  I just think that given the conundrum we’re in with NCLB [No Child Left Behind—Ed.] that quality criteria need to be rethought outside the cage the standards keep us locked up in.  A great example of this kind of thinking is the Rural School and Community Trust’s Place-based Education Portfolio Rubric.  This assessment tool was developed in cooperation with Harvard and ETS—what a great pedigree!  Better even are the kinds of outcomes the tool is designed to document and measure.  Content-area quality criteria, it seems to me, needs to be contextualized in a larger conversation about educational quality and purpose.

Craig: Critics of place-based mathematics state that the movement is just another fuzzy math movement. They see the “fluff” but no rigor. How might we proceed to avoid this perception?

David: To me the charge of fuzziness or fluff is comically ironic.  To accuse PBE of lacking rigor is essentially to avoid the very difficult intellectual challenge of imagining how schools might actually better serve people and the places where they live.  This is harder than rocket science, and maybe those critics just aren’t up to the intellectual challenge.

This doesn’t exactly help answer critics, but I think there is truth in it.  The challenge and the promise of PBE is not that it will be a more effective means of teaching a particular discipline.  As I’ve said, I think it is a mistake to foreground the argument for PBE by claiming it increases achievement in traditional skill performances and outcome measures.  My preferred strategy is to de-center the discourse of standards, testing, and rigor, and foreground instead the missing conversation about the relationship between places and community life.  Maybe we need to pull some set theorists and other accomplished mathematicians and scientists into this necessarily collaborative venture.  I bet they could help with the very difficult educational problems we are facing today.

Craig: Concerning the special concerns of actual land, do you consider place-conscious education as a rural issue only?  Could the work of Stephan Nathan Haymes in the urban area be considered just a social justice issue and not a socioecological one?

David: There are quite a number of theorists working in the tradition of critical geography who embrace place and forget the land.  Their attention is focused instead, as in the case of Haymes, on the very concrete problems of the city—racism and all kinds of related social, economic, and political power struggles.  Leaders in the environmental justice movement, such as Robert Bullard, claim that ecological sustainability or a land ethic will never happen without social justice.  I agree.  I also tend to think that social justice is not a possibility until people begin to recognize and rectify the relationship between people and the ecological contexts that make possible any cultural formation.

Many champions of social justice have not included the land in their cultural analysis.  One reason for this is that the social problems people experience are often so immediate, huge, and pressing.  As one of my students likes to say to me, it’s hard to think of the land with someone’s foot on your neck.  Another reason is that urban dwellers can easily forget about the land, or even the air.  It just isn’t part of some people’s day.  As Paul Shepard wrote in Nature and Madness, the city is a poor example of habitat with its “aberrant flora and fauna.”  This is why it is so important to reinsert the land into people’s experience of the city, and it’s happening all over the world.  Urban farms, gardens and other ecological restorations are part of numerous revitalization projects in urban spaces, and many times schoolchildren are involved.  People are naturally drawn to other living things, and place-conscious educators can help people everywhere remember that we really are part of a more-than-human world.