You create your place, but it shapes you too.
The term “place-based learning” has almost become overused jargon in my education-oriented mind, but the importance of it has yet to diminish. When you learn something within the relevant place, the knowledge is more valuable than if you were to learn in a traditional classroom. In my mind, if you learn something within four walls, then the information is confined to that space and therefore will not be as easily translated into the real world. Place-based and experiential learning allow learning to be long-term and meaningful. I can hardly recall any of the facts about Biology that I learned at university lectures, but I would probably be able to remember how to do some of the field procedures we did during lab courses.
Our place right now is City Studio. Yes, it has walls. Yes, it is a “classroom”. But instead of desks and chairs facing one teacher at the front, we sit in a circle with the facilitators interwoven. No power structures here. City Studio is located in the heart of False Creek, and so our initial projects were centered around our Place. We did a scan of the area to find out its past and present states, and found that it wasn’t always as pristine as it is today. Things that I probably should have guessed were brought to light. Coast Salish peoples including the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and the Squamish used to reside on that land along with a much richer biodiversity of flora and fauna. With colonialism came industrialization, and factories went up. All waste was dumped into the water or incinerated (and the ash was also thrown to the sea) and concrete was poured to create space for more factories and a train station. The water would have come all the way to Clark Street.
Our project was a sort of unveiling of the past to inform the future. We wrote words of past, present, and future people and disruptions on wooden blocks and fixed them to a brownfield fence. The blocks say things like “biodiversity, Musqueam, industry, greenest city action plan, reconciliation, resilience” etc. We also fixed a sign that said “This is a classroom. What can you learn here?” to suggest that this space that overlooks a barren brownfield could be a site of learning. And while explaining this to our cohort, we connected the words together with string to show how everything affects everything else, and that the past is still tied to the future. We then asked them to take an index card and some clothes pins and attach some of their own ideas to our web. Afterwards, we also left some paper and a pen up and silently invited the public to participate, and the project continued to grow organically. It is incredibly powerful to see how the general public can react when you ask them their opinion. We got some great answers like “how can this be a site of healing?” “there is no them, there is only us” and some specific question about birds. Rather than just presenting information, we asked people to make connections themselves and imagine the future of the space we learn in.
Some of the wooden blocks are still up, but the rains have washed away some of our project. Regardless, the work we did within and about this space won’t lose its value as we continue to work in the False Creek area.
