Sasha Mayer
2022
Topics: Education, Storytelling
Primary Methodology: Interviews
Abstract
Place-based education practice in North America regularly operates from euro-western worldviews of socio-ecological relations. This practice fails to deconstruct settler colonial myths and address the tensions of living in multicultural realities. This research investigates how multi-perspective place storytelling might serve as an intervention to the current euro-western orientation of place-based education. Place stories, across timescales, that explore socio-ecological relationships from the perspective of plants, animals, more-than-human beings, and the various communities that interact with the land now called Woodland Park, Seattle, will be compiled into a storybook designed for early education classrooms. The storybook and accompanying curriculum guide will be a tool for students and educators to consider the place that they are in holistically, ethically, and through a lens other than that of the dominant culture, and serve as a potential model for similar place-specific interventions.