Place-based Literacy: Grounding Reading in Place
It was my last year of high school and the final assignment for my history course was to write and present a research paper on a conflict in my Modern Western Civilization course. I chose “The Irish Conflict” from a list of 20 and began my research.
I really didn’t know much about the topic, but I figured I could tackle it (the presentation for this topic wasn’t scheduled until *after* the winter break). I would be travelling with my dad to visit my sister in the UK for a week and hoped to carve out some time for research between pub-hopping and site-seeing.
A week later we are in Norwich, England.
I mention sheepishly that I have a research paper to do over the holiday, and, before I know it, we are huddled around a desktop at the local internet cafe booking three economy tickets to Northern Ireland.
“This is going to be so cool!! I have always wanted to go to Northern Ireland!!” says my dad.
The next day, we are on a plane drinking Guinness and planning our two-day whirlwind tour of Belfast.
Though last-minute, the trip was jam-packed. We booked a black taxi tour through the Protestant and Catholic neighbourhoods of Belfast studying murals, examining memorial plaques and historically significant sites, and documenting everything on a small hand-held tape recorder. I even mustered up the courage to approach a pub-dwelling local to ask about his perspective and history, which he was more than willing to share. This experience, paired with readings along the way, allowed me to begin to unpack the complexity and historical threads of this history.
I began ravaging articles and books. And I was not really a reader. But I became consumed by complementary and overlapping texts, many of which problematized my initial understandings. The texts helped to extend my thinking, and also contributed to the fluency with which I read.
I came back prepared to present a paper on the Irish conflict (complete with photos, props, recordings, and, of course, thanks to my theatre background, an accent I had practiced on the flight home).
The trip deepened my understanding and engagement by providing me with the opportunity to map my knowledge onto place: words from the page came to life through the sights, smells, sounds, tastes and voices of Belfast.
Learning through place is not a new concept. Field trips have been a part of education for a long time. But trips are usually an add-on, not something that is truly integrated into a learning plan and intentionally organized around literacy as a central goal. Place-based literacy, on the other hand, uses place as the focal point for student inquiry, and, if orchestrated responsively and effectively, fosters engagement, supports fluency, and deepens comprehension — and may just be the solution to creating an entrypoint into reading for older striving readers.
Following the work of Freire and others, Kerkham and Comber (2013) explore place-based literacy as a way of grounding knowledge in place and taking action on issues of social and or eco-justice (Kerkham & Comber, p.197, 2013). Engagement, motivation and comprehension are deepened by utilizing multimodal and digital literacies to connect students “with the places where they live and learn” (p. 197). These authentic, real-world literacy experiences allow students to unpack the relationship between their identity and place and “inevitably draws teachers [and students] into the politics of place…rais[ing] questions concerning what is worth preserving and what should be transformed” (p. 197).
Critical to place-based literacy is both the students’ critical reading of place and their production of texts that disrupt and challenge dominant narratives of place. This shift in curricular focus to critical analysis and text production allows “students [to] became knowledge producers about their places” (Cormack, 2013, p.125). Lived experiences, from both students and community members, as well as cultural, spiritual and embodied understandings are valued, as are the students and community members sharing them. This “disrupt[s]…the underlying ‘grammar’ of schooling (Tyack and Tobin 1994 in Cormack, p.125)…[which assumes] that students must be removed from their communities…to learn valued knowledge; that valued knowledge comes from authorized texts; and that the teacher is the key broker and/or creator of the texts students learn from” (p. 125). Place-based literacy centers individual and collective community knowledge and ways of knowing to empower students’ literacy development and growth.
A mentor text for a place-based literacy project is Natasha Henry’s rewriting of Ontario Heritage plaques to include omissions, including Black Canadian and Indigenous histories, including Chloe Cooley, whose resistance to enslavement, led to the the 1793 Act to Limit Slavery in Upper Canada and paved the way for the underground railroad.
Henry, a historian, lecturer at U of T and president of the Ontario Black History Society, draws her experience and identity as a Black historian & educator in her critical reading and production of texts that challenge colonial perceptions and representations of place. Her identity anchors her work: she shares her connection to uncovering and amplifying these stories of resistance of Black women of the past. "Oftentimes, the voices, the experiences of Black women, particularly during colonial times, these kinds of projects are not often captured, so I wanted to make sure that their experiences were captured…" (Henry, 2021)
Henry’s project involves both a critical reading of place through her lived experiences as well as accompanying research, and the production texts that bring to light significant histories that have been omitted from Canada’s historical narrative— a decoding, recoding and encoding of text.
An important aspect of place-based literacy is that it is not limited to print. “[Being] literate …extend[s] beyond ‘cracking the code’ to helping young people to build bridges between the forms of language and literacy they know and regularly use, and the new forms introduced in school (Dyson in Cormack, p. 124). In “Exploring Rurality: Teaching Literacy,” Cormack shares an example of place-based literacy as an anchoring tool to build upon forms of community literacy. He documents a Kindergarten class’ investigation into the Newfoundland Christmas tradition of “mummering,” a practice brought to NFLD centuries ago where neighbors use household items to disguise their identities and then go door-to-door singing and telling stories. Mummering had been largely forgotten in the community. In addition to using videos, the internet, pictures, and print texts to learn about mummering, students also interviewed older community members about the practice. The culminating project was a scrapbook which incorporated pictures, interviews, and quotes that used local dialect and grammar “Guess who we is?” The teacher then orchestrated a mummering experience where students dressed up and visited a local retirement residence to bring the tradition back to life (Cormack, p. 125).
In the example above, the teacher anchors place-based literacy in local literacies, including oral tradition of storytelling through her orchestration of interviews of community members, and then used overlapping multimodal and complementary texts to support students to build background knowledge, learn new vocabulary.
Effective place-based literacy projects should be grounded in student and community literacies and build upon them to support background knowledge, the development of vocabularies, and to increase student print literacy, including their reading and writing.
So how might place-based literacy be utilized effectively to support striving readers?
There are a number of challenges older striving readers face when they enter the classroom. Motivation and engagement are gravely impacted by years of not receiving adequate instruction. Additionally, students can face gaps in background knowledge, vocabulary, syntactic knowledge, or with word recognition (decoding words with automaticity). The emotional layers piled on top of gaps in knowledge and reading ability can seem impossible to tackle as a teacher.
But place-based literacy provides an entrypoint for students to engage in meaningful and authentic projects that can empower them and support their development as readers and writers.
Start with place.
Start with students’ own experiences and knowledge about a place and build upon it.
As students wander through a park or neighbourhood, they can take note of their relationship and experience of the place, compare notes and experiences as a class and the engage in the Question Formulation Technique to begin their critical reading of the place.
They may begin to see it in a new light and attach meaning to it based on their differing experiences. A statue, which may have been an obstacle to climb as a child, might unveil itself as a signifier of colonialism. The collaborative knowledge building process engages students in a critical reflection on their identity and understanding of place as it relates to collective memory and the memorialization of history.
When students experience a place (whether positively or negatively) they leave with an embodied understanding and personal connection, a portal into a world of inquiry.
From place to text.
Build upon students’ knowledge and inquiry questions by providing them with multimodal texts that increase in complexity. Feel it, see it, explain it, listen to something about it, watch something about it, talk about it, and then, read about it. The careful interleaving and scaffolding of multimodal* texts with students’ lived experience can support a progression to more complex texts. These text sets of videos, pictures, articles, interviews, allow students to access to content knowledge in several modes and are therefore accessible to many different learners; the “set” aspect also serves to spiral key vocabulary and core concepts leading to a mastery of disciplinary vocabulary and content knowledge (Kerkham & Comber 2013; Catts 2022; Melissa and Lori Love Literacy, Episode 103, From Workshop Model to Reading Science in Pentucket). Text sets are also highly customizable and allow teachers to scaffold student learning by beginning with an something easily accessible and moving to increasingly complex texts. The “text-upon-text” serves as a staircase to increasingly complex texts that contain discipline-specific vocabulary.
From text to real-world acts of literary resistance.
Engage students in an project that allows them to produce a text that disrupts or challenges dominant narratives about a place.
Share the power in acts of literary resistance by sharing mentor texts (Natasha Henry’s rewriting of Ontario Heritage Trust plaques, for example). Scaffold writing into the process from inquiry to production by drawing on The Writing Revolution.
Ontario’s new grade 9 destreamed English Curriculum directs educators to teach of foundational skills and knowledge by“immers[ing] [students] in rich literacy experiences that cultivate a sense of enjoyment about learning” (2023). Perhaps place-based literacy is the place to start.
Kerkham, L., Kerkham, L., Comber, B. (2013). Literacy, Place-Based Pedagogies, and Social Justice. In: Green, B., Corbett, M. (eds) Rethinking Rural Literacies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137275493_11
*Multimodal Texts: “Sets of texts” including videos, podcasts, pictures, articles, all focused on the same topic.
