Place-Based Education as a Call from/for Action

Abstract

This section features four accounts of the kind of struggles educators encounter once they engage in place-based activities. These struggles are characterized by overcoming dualisms such as global/local and subject/object. From the four chapters, simultaneously, one can learn how “place” guides educators to ways along which they can overcome such dualisms. The four studies presented in this section share a notion of place inextricably bound with human action. As highlighted repeatedly in this section, the word “place” refers to the ancient Greek word plateia (πλατεία, street), a central place in town where people came to both talk to and listen to others and where human action is “taking place.” Human action, in turn, can be taken as a dialectic unit, which is realized both on the ideal and material plane, thereby uniting global/local and object/subject dualisms (Leont’ev 1978).