A Critical Pedagogy of Place: Learning through the Body

The article provides a pedagogical strategy that incorporates feminist geographic understandings of space, place, and time to advance feminist analytics of societal power. It describes an historically situated campus field trip at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that focuses on the long-term struggle for women to gain access to the university. In doing so, it provides a template for other feminist teachers interested in an experiential approach to student learning that helps students understand the operation of systems of social control. The article argues for a critical pedagogy of place that examines familiar places on a campus in which students' lives are already situated, and it demonstrates how this approach helps students build on the knowledge they already hold to discover connections among space, knowledge, and power for themselves. The analytic lens of place, space, and time, coupled to specific historical and contemporary sociocultural conflicts, allows students to articulate their everyday life experiences to broader historical and contemporary structures of power, while at the same time developing a deeper appreciation of how spatialized power dynamics govern human bodies.