Place-as-Text
“The natural tendency of faculty members is to provide our maps for students to learn. We tell them what they will observe when they enter our territory and how to negotiate a path through its environs. And too often what students are rewarded for seeing is exactly what we tell them is to be seen. Active learning on NCHC’s alternative model is enabling students to draw their own maps, of telling us what they have discovered. Only then do we compare what has been found with what others have found before them. Learning becomes discovery and not just recapitulation.”
Place-as-Text Resources
Braid, Bernice and Long, Ada, "Place as Text: Approaches to Active Learning" NCHC Monographs Series 3 (2000).
Long, Ada, "Writing on Your Feet: Reflective Practices in City as Text™. A Tribute to the Career of Bernice Braid" NCHC Monographs Series 24 (2014).
I first encountered Place-as-Text pedagogy at the Honors Faculty International Institute held at Texas Christian University in the Summer of 2019. We were dropped at the Fort Worth Stockyards with a sheet of loosely-related prompts and invited to explore, make observations, and talk to people. I was taken with the concept, and immediately began devising miniature applications in my courses, sending students to musical events, church services, and even the library. To get a better sense of the craft, I also began collecting the monographs (see “Resources” above) and attending City-as-Text sessions at the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) conferences.
