Rethinking the place of place in geography education

Increased global interdependence demands a new approach to geography education. This dissertation is particularly attentive to the construction and development of the concept of place in geography education. To evaluate this, the dissertation consists of three independent, yet interrelated studies that explore the everyday experiences students and prospective teachers have with geography. The studies are designed to address a gap across three disciplines: geography education, critical geography, and civic education. To better prepare student to be actively engaged in the world around them, this gap must be minded.;The three studies that comprise this dissertation each explore a different set of questions and produce overlapping, yet unique findings. The first study, conducted with U.S. students, examined their everyday experiences with geography education. These students produced a model of the tactics students use when they encounter places. The model explains how students made meaning of places and how they acted in accordance with their understanding. The second study, conducted with Malawian students, explored how they made meaning of their localities and how this was related to their civic identities. They show us the complexities related to a sense of place demonstrating that places do have a recognizable sense of place held by a broad group of students, that this sense of place is actively maintained through behavior and affiliation in order to produce a certain belief about how the country should be organized, that this sense of place is sometimes challenged by individuals and groups who feel excluded by the dominant sense of place, and that articulation of the sense of place serves explicit political, personal, and cultural agendas. These students also offered a model of civic engagement that located civic participation purposely and strongly in the place to which it was assigned. The final study, conducted with prospective teachers, explored the conceptions of place they bring brought to the classroom and how they implemented this. While these interns offer optimism, they also showed the difficulties surrounding the implementation of ideas that challenge the dominant paradigm of a discipline. One intern offered a model of implementation drawing on local place and familiar systems.;None of the studies in this dissertation are about geography education, yet each speaks to geography education. The final chapters of the dissertation address the ways in which these everyday experiences which parallel the theories from critical geography challenge the current frameworks of geography education and offer new possibilities for rethinking the place of place in geography education. In particular, this dissertation examines five factors---the prevalence of counternarratives within a sense of place, the role of perception in understanding place, the limitation of the normalizing process when making comparisons, the role of discourse communities to which students belong in affecting how they make sense of places, and what constitutes a map skill---that propose to reshape the activities and purposes of geography education. Finally, the work addresses the implications for civic education. While often neglected by geography educators, civic education is a component of all of the social studies. Rethinking how we define and use place, particularly in a manner that draws attention to the social interactions that actively construct place, requires attention to the way in which civic participation shapes and is shaped by place.