Your Place or Mine? Reading Art, Place and Culture

The article focuses on the deficiencies in the teacher education programs in the U.S. many teacher education programs continue to produce fragmented experiences for students. This structure of fragmentation commonly derives from teacher education standards that are mandated by individual states and force colleges of education into the position of creating programs that demonstrate compliance with governing codes. Educational practices are usually developed and become entrenched without a clear articulation of the theories on which they are founded. Critical pedagogy is committed to the exploration and development of a culture of schooling that supports the nature of self-conscious critique. Like critical pedagogues, place-based educators are centrally concerned with cultural context of teaching and learning and the role of schooling in shaping and reconstructing society. In drawing on the local environment, they also often focus explicitly on ecological contexts of community life, and thus seek to expand critical pedagogy's decidedly cultural focus to include the total ecological realm of human experience