A sense of place

Students´ experiences with place-based reading

Abstract

Place-based reading (PBR) is a method of teaching that, through a four-phased model, establishes a didactic framework for literature teaching outside the classroom. PBR scaffolds and directs students’ bidirectional attention on a literary text in its interaction with a carefully selected teaching site in the school’s local area. PBR is based on theoretical assumptions taken from the phenomenological place-philosophical study of literature and Scandinavian “udeskole” teaching outside the classroom, respectively. The article presents a qualitative interventional study comprising five tests of PBR in a secondary school class throughout a school year with a view to studying how students experience PBR teaching, and what characterizes their bidirectional attention on the text and the location. The data material consists of verbal statements made by students, audiorecorded and collected in lessons and interviews. These statements are analyzed in open coding based on constructing grounded theory, followed by a theorydriven interpretation of the findings based on the phenomenological concept of place and the didactic concept of bidirectional attention. The open coding reveals that using the PBR method in teaching can potentially add a new time dimension to some students’ attention to text and place. Potentially, PBR can prompt recognition and conceptions of “how it must have been” to be present in the text’s narrative present as well as in the historical past of the place. The theory-driven interpretation of these findings indicates that PBR, for some students, may help to bridge the gap between the local and the global, the past and the present, the outside world and the self, and between literature, literary history and the lifeworld of student-readers. Finally, the article discusses whether PBR could be a point of departure for the critical inquiry into what forms students’ own physical and mental horizons, as part of literature teaching. The potentials of PBR revealed in the study express the method’s world-orientation. Based on this, the article concludes that PBR may constitute an alternative to the apparently prevalent period- and concept-oriented approach in literature teaching in secondary school today.