Introduction: Placing Memory and Heritage in the Geography Classroom

This special issue was conceived in April 2011 at the National Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Seattle. There I organized and chaired a panel discussion about pedagogical approaches to courses that focus in any way on the social processes of commemoration and preservation. Our aims were to not only improve our own pedagogy by sharing ideas, but to also encourage our colleagues to discuss these types of landscapes openly and critically in their classrooms. That panel has now evolved into this special issue of Southeastern Geographer that delivers our ideas, practices, and experiences to a larger audience. (Hey, the room in Seattle only fit 50 people. There’s over 550 members in SEDAAG alone!)

We take this opportunity to directly approach the following specific problem: few citizens possess the tools to analyze commemorative landscapes in such a critical way as to understand their intricate and public expressions of history, heritage, and normative power. Of all the elements of the cultural landscape, those of memorials, monuments, and preserved historic sites that reflect and reinforce our past and its lessons are among the most popular and contentious. As James Loewen (2000)a and Owen Dwyer and Derek Alderman (2008ab and Owen Dwyer and Derek Alderman (2008b) indicate, the memorialized landscape deftly teaches all of us about our past in ways beyond what we can get in the history classroom.

The higher education classroom is one environment where the lessons of interpreting memorialized and preserved landscapes can be approached. Commemorative landscapes have become a type of “public pedagogy,” that, ideally, are accessible to everyone in a given community (Giroux 2000; Sandlin et al. 2010). Philosopher Charles L. Griswold reinforces this notion, stating, “. . . the architecture by which a people memorializes itself is a species of pedagogy” (1986, p 689). This special issue bridges the divide between what memorial landscapes express and how citizens respond and further investigates how effectively the memorial landscape normalizes American society.

Examining our commemorated, memorialized, and preserved landscapes is an inherently geographic practice that looks at place, the landscape, and their ultimate meanings to their communities. Practiced locally, this “place-based pedagogy,” writes Eric L. Ball and Alice Lai, “. . . listens to the locals by paying close attention to local students’ interests and by examining texts, artifacts, and performances of local cultural production . . .” (2006, p 261). This type of pedagogy has, however, gone by other titles in those studies that detail these engagements. Given our background of field-work, geographers are ideally suited for such public pedagogy (Walcott 1999). Our discipline provides the ideal paradigm for “place-based education,” as has been detailed by Smith (2002), Israel (2012), and Gruenewald (2003). Jeff R. Crump uses the term Community Service-based Learning (CSBL) in the same vein (2002). Practitioners have also analyzed their use of “critical pedagogy” as an approach to bringing lessons of social justice into their classroom (Oberhauser 2002; Gruenewald 2003; Klein et al. 2011). Amongst these papers, Klein et al., stands out for its depth and critical analysis of why geographers should be reaching out to their communities and how such interaction benefits students, faculty, and community organizations. Geographers possess a number of tools and potential multidisciplinary ties that make working with local communities dynamic in any number of ways and virtually any type of organization or need (Klein et al. 2011).

The question is: How do we do this? What are the best assessments, readings, and activities that we as professors can use to teach our students—from freshmen to doctoral—how to understand, assess, and interact with the commemorative landscape as both a scholar and an engaged, democratically aware, and socially just citizen? The introspective questions outlined and suggested by Loewen and Dwyer and Alderman certainly get to this point (Loewen 2000; Dwyer and Alderman 2008a, 2008b). But in what types of student-teacher environments can these questions be asked? Methods such as service-learning, traditional lecture methods, and more Socratic discussions are all possible avenues for getting our students active not only with the scholarly material, but also in their local community and helping to create a more...