Childhood Geographies and Spatial Justice: Making Sense of Place and Space-Making as Political Acts in Education
Abstract
This post-qualitative research analyzes the spatialized practices of young people within a working-class community and how those guided the opening and facilitating of a local community center. Seeing place-making as a social and political act, the authors were inspired by Heath’s classic study and argument that children’s education might be better served if educators understood and built on their community-based language practices. Writing through theories of new materialism, spatiality, and children’s geographies, we build an argument for spatial justice by considering the ways educational scholars and educators might understand and build on children’s community-based spatial practices.
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Biographies
STEPHANIE JONES is Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Georgia, 225 Cambridge Drive, Athens, GA Georgia 30606; e-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests include feminist and class-sensitive pedagogy, justice-oriented teacher education, and educational experiences of children and youth from marginalized families and communities.
JAYE JOHNSON THIEL is assistant professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in the Department of Child and Family Studies. Her research explores how material-discursive entanglements produce opportunities for intellectual fullness to emerge during creative play and how these moments serve as counter-narratives to deficit discourses surrounding women, children, families, and teachers.
DENISE DÁVILA is assistant professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her research examines community-based and cross-disciplinary literacy education for ethnically, linguistically, and socioeconomically diverse groups of young children and their families.
ELIZABETH PITTARD is clinical assistant professor at Georgia State University. Her research interests are grounded in feminist poststructuralism, investigating the working lives of women elementary school teachers, and the manifestations of neoliberalism in P–12 and teacher education.
JAMES F. WOGLOM is assistant professor in the Department of Art at Humboldt State University. James is a multimedia artist and educator whose research interests include arts-based inquiry and ontology in education.
TARYRN BROWN is a doctoral student in the Department of Educational Theory and Practice at the University of Georgia. Her research interests include adolescent girls’ and young mothers’ experiences with schooling.
XIAODI ZHOU is a doctoral student in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia. His research interests include multilingual literacies and identities.
MARIANNE SNOW is a doctoral student in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia.
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Article first published online: July 11, 2016
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