What rural farmers in Montana can teach us about location-based learning.
thanks to http://depts.washington.edu/dmachine/mschung/thesis/presentation/04-object.html
Reading Corporeal Experience: A Haptic Way of Knowing, felt like hitting the jackpot. Maire Eithne O'Neill pulls together all the threads of Learning Theory, Dance, Georgraphy, Ethnography, Urban planning, Human Cognition, Environmental Psychology and in particular; case studies of ranchers in rural Montana, to explore the importance of embodied experience to our understanding of space and place.
She is primarily trying to establish new pedagogic methods for design, and especially in architecture, however I'd argue the discussion can be extended to any discipline involving spatial or platial cognition.
Her argument is so clear it sounds more like common sense.
Physical work, movement, and intimate contact with the built and natural landscape give people the opportunity to formulate knowledge about places that cannot be gained by singularly visual means.
(...)
Design education in general has failed to establish pedagogic methods for appropriately exploring a range of topistic (place) experiences as tools for design. In formal design learning, we rarely address or explore culturally and individually developed topistic experiences because we do not understand these modes of learning very well, and perhaps because this kind of autonomous knowledge undermines authority.
She introduces (and even invents when there's a gap) a surprising number of terms to describe how we learn and create meaning during location-based experiences.
I'm reminded again that I haven't even scratched the surface when it comes to understanding the value of location-based learning and more specifically, it's place in education.
>Haptic
>Somatic
>Topistic
>Spatial
>Placial
>Corporeal knowledge
>Body-ballet
>Place-ballet
>Kinesthetic
>Pathic
and that's without even mentioning the old faithfuls:
>Experiential
>Action-based
>Embodied
>Situated