Abstract
Small, residential liberal arts campuses pride themselves on the features of place, but rarely think of the relationship between the actual physical campus and the culture of the institution as parts of place-based education. The interrelationships between the physics of the campus (size, geography, architecture, and history) and the functioning of the campus culture can suggest that place-based learning should be extended to the college campus and culture. This chapter explores these often powerful connections between place and culture, place and learning, place and history of an institution. Using Oxford College of Emory University as a case study of the small, residential liberal arts college, this chapter advocates for the identification of the unique features of place and culture that contextualize learning and growth.
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Notes
- 1.
Fritz’s Steele’s The Sense of Place is an anchoring text that describes the ways that individual perceptions represent one’s relationship to place. A foundational text published before place-based education (PBE) really began, it is often cited in essays, studies, and bibliographies involving PBE. Steele delves into the relationship between individuals and place, including such immeasurable qualities as essence and spirit of a place. Notwithstanding these emphases, Steele’s argument focuses on the individual’s perceptions that represent one’s relationship to a place. See also Wilson, “A Sense of Place.”
- 2.
See Chapter 5, Chambliss and Takacs, How College Works. The authors argue that students who develop this sense of belonging will persist, even flourish, and learn more deeply. For other attachment to place essays, see Sobel, Children’s Special Places.
- 3.
See Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains.
- 4.
See Cook and Lewis, The Divine Comity Collaboration. This seminal book calls for collaborations between student life and academic affairs. Students experience college life as various manifestations of a single thing. We as various kinds of professionals analyze and compartmentalize the campus when it would be “divine” to creatively collaborate to provide seamless experiences that achieve the learning outcomes the institution seeks. Student life, the academic divisions and departments, the library, and all other units on campus can work together to achieve greater learning experiences for students.
- 5.
On this point of “permanence,” I am convinced after nearly three decades of teaching that students associate professors, staff, and the physical campus in a very clear way. We may make many distinctions (about tenure track, adjunct lecturers, or interim and acting positions, for examples) but for students the people who populate their days and years on the campus form the college experience and determine the degree of their belonging.
- 6.
The idea that places foster learning is hardly new; for the privileged few, taking the Grand Tour in past centuries was founded on the idea of learning from places, meeting the people of importance who resided there, perhaps immersing oneself in the language, and experiencing the culture that instructed young nobility to be informed citizens, leaders, or princes.
- 7.
See, for example, Worster, “Sense of Place among New England Commercial Fisherman and Organic Farmers.”
- 8.
The literature on place attachment in children and adolescents is fairly abundant. Theories of attachment are offered by Bowlby in Attachment, and by Sobel’s Children’s Special Places and Beyond Ecophobia.
- 9.
See Chambliss and Takacs, How College Works and particularly the section in Chapter 5 on Randall Collins’ revision of Emile Durkheim’s process of belonging in a religious community.
- 10.
I’ve presented papers on inquiry-guided learning at Association of General and Liberal Studies (AGLS) and the Association of Core Texts (ACTC), and the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). The redesign panel occurred at the AAC&U Annual Conference in 2014.
- 11.
See Rogers and Galle, How to Be a ‘HIP’ College Campus.
- 12.
This idea of a culture devoted to learning is in part attributable to John Tagg’s The Learning Paradigm College (Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing, 2003. Tagg’s important book describes institutions that place learning before all things that institutions can value. His idea that such institutions vary in size, history, setting, and student composition but are similar in the way they arrange activities around the central and unique mission of learning within the college.
- 13.
Oliver, Cornerstone and Grove, 12. Through these elements, which are consistent and continual facets of the college as place across more than 175 years of its history, Oliver conveys a sense of its core identity.
- 14.
These materials possess an individual history and meaning for members of the college community. I do not detail those meanings here, for the reason that readers should see the documents as types for similar kinds of efforts in their own institutions.
- 15.
See Chambliss, How College Works, Chapter 5, 79–83, for a discussion of Randall Collins’ recapitulation of Emile Durkheim’s notion of how emotional solidarity is formed. For a more complete analysis of the role of ritualized activities, see Collins’ Interaction Ritual Chains.
- 16.
A strong chaplain’s office at the college connects to the specific history of Emory College as a Methodist institution and also to the evolution of the office of the Chaplain.
- 17.
See How to be a ‘HIP’ College Campus. The focus of the Moon book on relationships and the six recurring factors of Oliver also emerge in the interviews undertaken during the research for this recent book. The consistency of values across time, at least for those whose stories become part of the histories and indeed the folklore of the college underscore the persistence of institutional identity and place over time.
- 18.
Derek Bok, Our Underachieving Colleges, 358.
- 19.
Ibid., 360.
- 20.
This seminar, hosted by Oxford College, attended by Emory administration including President Jim Wagner and Provost Earl Lewis, featured a number of presentations of transformative models in higher education. According to Emory Strategic Plans webpage, participants in the seminar included “representatives of the Gates, Lumina, and Jack Kent Cook foundations, and the Posse Program, MDRC, the National Survey of Student Engagement, the Educational Testing Service, and principals from leading higher education research institutes[, who] left thinking about how others could apply or adapt ‘The Oxford Model.’”
- 21.
See Andrew Delbanco, What College Was, Is, and Should Be (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2012) and Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2015).
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Galle, J. (2017). The Potential for Place-Based Learning Experiences on the College Campus. In: Shannon, D., Galle, J. (eds) Interdisciplinary Approaches to Pedagogy and Place-Based Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50621-0_7
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