Deepening Students' Place Thinking and Writing

The act of writing is part of the process of relating to place – not just a record of it (Cresswell, 2019:3)

 

Photograph of a dragon fly (courtesy of Melanie Lum)

In the teaching of Geography in Everyday Life (GEL) cluster, many of us are often excited yet apprehensive about teaching the topics of relationship between human and nature (1.1) and how people acquire a sense of place (1.2). Not just because they appear as the first two topics of the new upper secondary school year, they also appear deceivingly simple to teach whence in fact, the concepts are more abstract than we might think. When taught well, they can be a wonderful introduction to Geography, engaging and motivating our learners to understand the key concepts of the discipline.

 

I find Tim Cresswell’s ideas useful in helping teachers to design learning experiences that help students discover the key concepts in these two topics. Rawlings Smith provides us with a friendly summary of Cresswell’s book Maxwell Street: Writing and Thinking Place (2019). In this blog, I will be sharing snippets of Cresswell’s ideas through Rawlings Smith’s summary and illustrating them with local examples.

 

Idea 1: Make lists

Cresswell suggested list-making as a simple method to get school students approach a place. Unlike qualitative methods like ethnographic research or quantitative methods to sense make geographical phenomena using numbers, it is straight-forward to get students to write out lists of what can be found in a place. This allows students to focus their energies to observe things, people and activities. This is especially so for the neighbourhood in which the school is located in. Students often rush to and out of school, ignoring details in their haste.

Fig 1: The eco-pond at Punggol Park

Using the example of an eco-pond at Punggol Park (Fig 1), the list may look like this, after classification:

 

Things I can see	People	Activities
·      Natural banks of the pond ·      Pavilions ·      Restaurant ·      Resting benches ·      Dragonflies	·      Cyclists ·      Joggers ·      Hobby anglers  ·      Retirees (?) ·      Students training for cross country	·      Cycling ·      Jogging, walking ·      Fishing ·      Exercising ·      Walking the dogs
Things I can hear	Things I can feel	Things I can smell
·      Calls of white-breasted waterhens ·      Faint shouting of a teacher giving instruction ·      Overhead aeroplane	·      The afternoon heat ·      Serenity, calm ·      Slight breeze	·      The slightly oily odour of fried food from the restaurant

 

Idea 2: Uncover stories, voices and representations

This approach requires a little bit of work on the part of the teacher and student teams. Examples of these include using writings by authors about the place as they write about what they might hear, see and smell. Students may conduct simple interviews or invite users of the place to draw mental maps to uncover how a place may be perceived.

 

Some of these interviews and perspectives might be narratives of the past, which provide an interesting contrast. Historical maps, photographs may even document how changes occurred, and therefore allowing us to infer how identities may have been shaped by these changes. If there are community galleries, museums and preserved buildings or structures for students to visit, Cresswell notes that such “materialities” provoke recall and therefore memories for different groups of people. 

 

For example, growing up in Queenstown in my childhood years, the neon sign that reads “Queen” (in Chinese characters) from the Queensway cinema (Figs 2 and 3) meant a family outing to the bowling alley, a treat of a chicken pie and a Vitagen cultured milk drink for my sister and I. I would still be able to reminisce the taste and flavour of the warm pie as I hear bowling balls crash into the bowling pins! To an outsider, it may be a neon sign from a cinema building which had been torn down, for me, it is more than just that.

Fig 2: The neon sign now is prominently placed at the community museum

 

Fig 3: The old cinema from which the neon sign came from

Idea 3: Offer a chance to engage in critical thinking, deeper inquiry and discourse

As a teacher, processes of place-remaking offer an opportunity to engage students with deeper discussions and critical thinking about issues. A place is not just a neutral stage where we find things, people and activities. People ascribe meanings, representations and even impose a certain narrative to shape behaviours and thinking. 

 

Using an example of Chinatown, it was once a residential and commercial area for more than a century since modern Singapore’s founding (Fig 4). Its remake into a kitsch, touristy locale has been lambasted by critics as unsustainable for businesses, driving away the essential land uses that made it unique in the first place. What is left behind are refurbished buildings that no longer serve their original purposes, instead taken over by trinket shops, restaurants that sell Korean food, cafes and beer gardens that attempt to draw in tourist dollars from international guests (Fig 5).

 

Fig 4: Old Chinatown in the 1960s - 70s

Fig 5: Present day Chinatown with the repurposed shophouses.

Cresswell suggests that people typically develop a “reactionary sense of place” that focuses on rootedness and attachment (Massey, 1991 cited in Rawlings Smith, 2021). These are evident from examples I have mentioned of the Punggol Park and the Queensway cinema. He also distinguishes a “progressive sense of place” (ibid) that focuses on flows, connections and networks, which is not dissimilar from the example of Chinatown.

 

Cresswell argues that the reactionary and progressive sense of place insufficiently explain why places become connected in the way they do. Beyond these two dimensions of sense of place, Cresswell suggests a third. He challenges us to consider how a place might be theorized in a way that goes beyond the opposition of a reactionary or progressive sense of place. This theory of place will require an account of time and change, i.e., temporality as the third dimension. 

 

By bringing power into the discussion, we might therefore ask:

·      What kind of Chinatown might we see today if residential land uses were spared the process of urban renewal ordered by the newly independent government in the 1960s?

 

By using an agentic approach, we might inquire:

·      How might the heritage and identity of Queenstown be remade so that it is more than just another sought after estate that is attractive because it is near the city?

 

By framing it with a theme of agency and sustainability, we could consider:   

·      What are the ways in which Punggol Park can be redesigned to support a sustainable way of living for nearby residents? 

 

Conclusion

Places are multi-dimensional. To think and write about them in a unidimensional reactionary or progressive manner does not do justice to its uniqueness. Casey (1998) likens them to pieces of textile where threads of phenomena, material and intangible culture, practices and meanings are weaved together in a complex web. To help our students uncover a place, we can scaffold their engagement in levels of complexity as I have discussed above, so that they can explore places meaningfully to develop a deeper understanding of geography that will enhance disciplinary imagination, civic consciousness and action.

 

References:

Rawlings Smith, E. (2021), “Maxwell Street: Writing and thinking place”, Geography, Vol 106, part 1, p 53-56

The blog author wishes to acknowledge the originators of the photographs.