Evangeline O. Katigbak (National Institute of Education (Singapore))

Keywords
Geography
Social Studies
Identity
Diversity
Multicultural Education
Singapore

Introduction
Place is a core concept in geography. Geographers argue that place is a social construction (Lambert & Morgan, 2010), a product of social relations that span the globe (Massey, 1994, 2005). For Cresswell (2008), place gives us the ability to read and influence our understanding of various social and cultural issues. Therefore, place matters not only because it helps us frame our understanding of the world in a certain way but also because it challenges us to think about the ways we relate with each other and produce places in the process.  Given the centrality of place in geography, it is therefore important to pay attention to the ways place is (or can be) taught in classrooms not only for its own sake but more importantly, for the ways it can shape our student’s involvement in society. Lambert and Morgan (2010), for example, attend to the challenges of teaching place and suggest the evaluation of the geographical imagination that informs teaching in classrooms. Similarly, Bishop (2004) highlights the significance of place-based education and shares how local oral heritage interviews or fieldtrips to a protected wetland have taught her students a sense of community and place stewardship.

This paper aims to encourage an engagement with place by being “in-place.” I join the chorus of voices that argue for place-based education (e.g. Baldwin, Block, Cooke, Crawford, Naqvi, Ratsoy, Templeman, & Waldichuk, 2013; Bishop, 2004; Kirkby, 2014) but I extend existing arguments by suggesting that “placing” learners is particularly important in teaching about translocal and “worldly” places. Translocal[i] and worldly places are situated sites that are characterized by a social landscape that reflects transnationality. Worldly places are often found in world cities and are draped with worlding practices or “projects that attempt to establish or break established horizons or urban standards in and beyond a particular city” (Ong, 2011, p. 4). I draw on a place-based class activity that I did with my AAG10D (Singapore in Asia) students at the National Institute of Education (NIE) in Singapore in 2016 to emphasize the importance of “placing” learners, or allowing them to engage in place-based learning activities in order to help them understand the concept of place. In this activity, students were asked to work on a group-based poster project that aimed to help them interpret particular landscapes and analyze the geographies of particular places. Such an activity required students to conceive of place as fluid and contested (Massey, 1994). I discuss this class project and their implications for understanding the geographies of place in detail in the penultimate section of the paper. Before this, I elucidate the conceptualizations of place in geography; I outline this in the subsequent section. I conclude by underscoring the importance of “placing” learners in teaching place in particular and geography in general.