LEARNING IN A POSTINDUSTRIAL PLACE: READING THE MULTIPLE TEXTS OF
THE CITY
By
Aaron Thomas Bodle

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education
2012

	
  

	
  

ABSTRACT
LEARNING IN A POSTINDUSTRIAL PLACE: READING THE MULTIPLE TEXTS OF
THE CITY
By
Aaron Thomas Bodle
In the second half of the Twentieth Century, many Western industrial cities
underwent a gradual process of de-industrialization. This process reached its apex for
many U.S. cities in the 1990s. The dramatic economic and social devastation that
developed concomitantly with these economic changes left many urban policy makers,
service workers, and educators searching for answers. Factory Town, the setting of this
study, is one such city. In the past forty years, White flight, disinvestment, widespread
poverty, and high crime rates in the city have resulted in the emigration of 50% of
Factory Town’s residents. Those who remain have inherited a cityscape that resembles
a checkerboard of empty lots, abandoned homes, and brownfields. Among the many
challenges these changes have presented, providing effective and meaningful
education to the city’s residents ranks among the highest. Viewing learning as a social
process that is tightly linked to the contexts in which and for which it occurs, this
dissertation was framed with the following questions in mind. What are the narratives of
place that students encounter by virtue of living and learning in a postindustrial city?
How do these narratives, as they are interpreted, composed, and expressed in practice
serve as processes of place-making, or the active process of grasping one’s
relationship to the places they inhabit? How do students’ experiences of place influence
their sense of who they are, where they are in the world, and what is possible for the
future? This work contributes to the growing field of place-based education by providing

a complex and critical portrait of the pedagogical power of place in one postindustrial
city.
Fifteen high school students and two teachers associated with one urban high
school agreed to participate in this project. As ethnography, the study was conducted
using reflexive methodologies. It employed participant observation, a series of semistructured interviews, auto-driven photo-elicited interviewing, and an ongoing analysis of
my positionality as a researcher. Analysis and production of data occurred throughout
the process from forming the research questions to the final stages of the writing
process, heightening when data collection ended. Analysis involved open-coding, two
stages of memo-writing, and peer debriefing techniques. Data were analyzed in
relationship to theory in critical geography and place-based education.
Places are inscribed with, and reify power relations stabilizing, directing, and
organizing “who we are in relationship to where we are” (Casey, 1993, p. xv). Students’
experiences of Factory Town, for example, stabilized their sense of racial and class
divisions as they were inscribed in physical borders that divided the city. On the other
hand, students’ readings of the non-aestheticized places of the postindustrial city,
former industrial sites and residential neighborhoods produced a non-linear sense of
temporality in which the past, present, and future were simultaneously present. These
experiences opened a sense of possibility amidst narratives of decline dominating
national and local discourse related to the city. The voices of the participants in this
study provide a window into possibilities for place-based educators attempting to
encourage students to develop an ethic of care for the places they inhabit.

Lovingly dedicated to Amanda Chapman Bodle

	
  

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation could not have proceeded as successfully as it did without the
dedicated work of Lynn Paine, the chair of my dissertation committee and my academic
advisor for the past five years. Her openness to my explorations allowed me to follow
academic curiosities in ways that graduate students are rarely afforded. I am also
grateful to the members of my dissertation committee; Elizabeth Heilman, Kyle
Greenwalt, Avner Segall, and Lynn Fendler for their constructive feedback, caring
advice, and thoughtful suggestions throughout the writing process.
I will be forever grateful to the many extraordinary staff and faculty members in the
College of Education at Michigan State University who made this work possible. They
include, but are not limited to Jack Schwille, Suzanne Wilson, Michael Sedlak, Susan
Melnick, Margo Glew, Amy Peebles, and Peter Youngs. I am forever in your debt.
The Graduate School at Michigan State University, and The Department of
Teacher Education provided the funding without which the project would not have been
possible.
I would also like to express my gratitude to the students, teachers, and
administrators at Workman High School, and their families in Factory Town. Because I
have promised not to reveal your names, I cannot mention them now, but you know who
you are. Thank you for your patience, kindness, and willingness to participate in this
project. Most importantly, thank you for teaching me what it means to be “real.” I will
carry your lessons, and the undying spirit of your city, with me for a lifetime.
Words do no just to my love and appreciation for my family. I want to thank my

v	
  
	
  

mother, Marcella Meinerding Bodle, for teaching me what it means to love and care for
other people. I also acknowledge my brothers John Bodle, and Pete Bodle who
throughout my life, have continually inspired me to learn and grow. Finally, I lovingly
acknowledge the extraordinary contributions of Amanda Chapman Bodle and Kate
Lorelei Bodle, who have walked each step of this journey with me.

vi	
  
	
  

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES……………………………………………………………………………….ix
LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………………...x
CHAPTER 1
PLACE, PLACELESSNESS, AND PEDAGOGY: SITUATING A STUDY………………..1
Overview of the Study and Research Questions……………………………………...4
Filling Critical Gaps……………………………………………………………………… 5
Situating the Place of the Study………………………………………………………...6
Whose Stories Contribute to Mine?.........................................................................9
Plan of the Dissertation…………………………………………………………………12
A Place for Possibilities…………………………………………………………………15
CHAPTER 2
MAPPING THE EPISTEMOLGICAL, METHODOLOGICAL, AND LIVED TERRAIN OF
THE STUDY……………………………………………………………………………………19
Part One: Place, Methodology, and Methods………………………………………...19
Critical Literature on Place and Place-based education………………………19
Place………………………………………………………………………… 20
Place-making………………………………………………………………..23
Place-based Education, Community-based Education, Situated
Pedagogy…………………………………………………………………………..24
Place-conscious Education and My Use of the Field’s Central Tenets……..30
Methodology……………………………………………………………………….31
Ethnography…………………………………………………………………32
Texts as Interpretive Frames………………………………………………34
Research Text #1: Narrative Texts…………………………………36
Research Text #2: Global Education Texts………………………..38
Research Text #3: Critical and Civic Texts………………………...41
Methods…………………………………………………………………………….42
Methods Used when Working with Students…………………………….45
Auto-driven Photo-elicited Interviewing…………………………….47
Method Used when Working with Teachers……………………………..48
Addressing Researcher Positionality……………………………………..49
Part Two: Factory Town and Factory Towners………………………………………55
Factory Town………………………………………………………………………56
Workman High School……………………………………………………………57
Student Participants………………………………………………………………62
CHAPTER 3
(NOT SO) DISTANT MEMEORIES: LONGING, NOSTALGIA, AND POSSIBILITY IN
POSTINDUSTRIAL PLACE-MAKING……………………………………………………….64
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Defining Nostalgia and Longing………………………………………………………..65
Focal Participants………………………………………………………………………..67
Reading the Ruins: Narrators of Nostalgia and Longing in Industrial Spaces……69
Reading the Residential: Nostalgia and Longing Close to Home………………….79
Economic and Social Change as Narrated by Parents and
Grandparents………………………………………………………………………84
Educational Places: The Factory Town Bus Tour Field Trip………………………..87
Taking the Tour……………………………………………………………………89
The Explicit Null and Societal Curricula of the Field Trip……………………..94
Nostalgia and Longing in Postindustrial Place-making……………………………...99
Preview of the Next Chapter………………………………………………………….101
CHAPTER 4
MAINTAINING BORDERS AND BOUNDERIES: CONTESTED GEOGRAPHIES OF
SELF AND OTHER………………………………………………………………….……….102
The Theoretical Space of the Chapter……………………………………….………104
Factory Town as (An)other Space: Building Borders Around the City…….……..106
The Recognition of a Non-Factory Town……………………………….……..113
“Factory Town is an Island:” Disconnected from the World………….……...116
Internal Boundaries: Building Racial Divisions within the City……………….…...120
Teachers’ Perceptions of Race and Class Divisions…………………….…..122
Students’ Perceptions of Race and Class Divisions…………………….…...125
Discourse #1: The Explicit Discourse of Human Diversity in ASHP…126
Discourse #2: Racial Divisions Below the Surface…………………….128
Policing the Boundaries: The Production of the “Global Other”…………….133
Policing the Boundaries: Policing the Body…………………………….135
Closing Thoughts………………………………………………………………………145
Preview of the Next Chapter………………………………………………………….148
CHAPTER 5
TOWARD A GLOBALLY CONCSIOUS PLACE-BASED EDUCATION…………….….149
Insights on Place-making, Temporality, and Possibility……………………………149
Insights on Situatedness and Contesting Boundaries……………………………..152
Implications for Place-based Education……………………………………………..155
Implications for Global Education…………………………………………………….158
Limitations of this Study……………………………………………………………….160
Future Areas of Inquiry………………………………………………………………..162
A Final Word……………………………………………………………………………163
REFERENCES……………………………………………………………………………….165

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LIST OF TABLES

TABLE 1
Number of Student Participants by Race, and Gender…………………………………....45

	
  

ix	
  

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1
Delphi Site as Photographed by Lana……………………………………………………….72
Figure 2
Nikia’s Photograph of a House with White Pillars………………………………………….80
Figure 3
Elizabeth’s Photograph of the Factory Town Sit-Down Strikers Memorial………………97
Figure 4
Elizabeth’s Photograph of the Women’s Brigade…………………………………………..98
Figure 5
Racial Distribution of AHSP Classroom……………………………………………………133

x	
  
	
  

CHAPTER ONE
Place, Placelessness, and Pedagogy: Situating a Study
“The world is places” (Snyder, 1990 p. 25)
Our sense of who we are is intimately intertwined with the places we inhabit. The
built environments of the places we call home are simultaneously the products of
human practices, and producers of human experience. As such, they are inscribed with
narratives of local politics, which are formed through their interaction with regional and
global power relations. Though we are intimately connected to the places we inhabit,
humans tend to overlook the power they hold in shaping who we are. Spatial theorists
attest, however, that a sense of belonging to a localized community has a profound
influence on human identity (Relph, 1976). Still, we tend to speak of place, view place,
and experience place as, simply, a “setting,” or a vessel for everyday life.
While place is often taken-for granted in the practices of day-to-day life, critical
geographers have identified a ‘spatial turn’ (Kitchens, 2009) in social science research.
This shift toward the power of space/place in our lives has stemmed from dramatic
changes in spatial relations occurring throughout the second half of the Twentieth
Century. The current epoch is profoundly characterized by processes of globalization.
Some argue globalization has led to the “flattening” of the world (Friedman, 2005),
pulling millions of people out of poverty worldwide. Others argue globalization has only
widened the gap between “the haves” and the “have-nots” of the global world (Florida,
2005; Stiglitz, 2007; Stromquist, 2002). Economic, social and technological changes
related to globalization have increased the mobility of people, products, and ideas,
leading to unprecedented migration across national boundaries. Regardless of one’s

	
  

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view of the flatness or spikiness of the globalized world, it is clear that globalization has
brought about dramatic changes in spatial relations, complicating a once-simplistic
sense of place as an empty vessel, and drawing attention to the need for rethinking how
places, and our attachments to them, inform our sense of who we are, our position in
relationship to others, and our possibilities for the future.
Economic globalization has produced a handful of “winners”--typically hailing
from the Western world--and an increasing number of “losers.” While many of the
“winners” praise the changes brought on by the global sweep of corporate capitalism,
many cities in the West have come out on the losing end. As Smith and Gruenewald
put it,
As multinational corporations constantly relocate in search of cheaper labor and
production costs, communities in the United States are left with high rates of
under- and unemployment, a shrinking tax base, and, often, environmental
decay. Wal-mart and other superstores continue to displace local businesses
and depress wages; the pressure to keep prices down leads to a downward
spiral of more downsizing, outsourcing, and fewer economic opportunities for
struggling communities. (Gruenewald & Smith, 2008 p. xiii)
These processes are maintained by policies, which have been targeted at “global flows
of capital,” rather than the impact they may have on the economic, cultural, and
environmental conditions they create. In short, these policies are “placeless.” They are
produced without consideration for the situated nature of human existence. The results
of these policies, described above by Gruenewald and Smith, have a profound impact
upon local communities, but they also impact the policy environments of institutions with

	
  

2	
  

tertiary relationships to economics; namely education. The increasing corporate
influence on education has resulted in a common acceptance that the express purpose
of schooling is preparing students for active participation in a “global economy.” The
corporate rhetoric of “efficiency” and “accountability” has taken the place of selfimprovement, criticality, and local relevance in the education discourse. State and
national standards emphasize the knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary for
st

success in the “21 century” or “global economy.” Economic rationales for public
education have always dominated school rhetoric at the policy level, and the corporate
link to schools has always been tight. Nevertheless, the overarching tone of
“placelessness” has never been clearer in the education policy literature (Gruenewald,
2003a, Gruenewlad & Smith, 2008). In short, the standards and accountability
movements have created an educational environment which serves economic
commitments over commitments to the local, national, and global communities schools
serve.
Place-conscious education is one curricular movement which has developed in
response to these growing trends. Kitchens (2009) defines “situated pedagogy,” a
derivative of place-conscious education, as:
[A pedagogy which] connects the curriculum to the everyday lives of students and
is interested in identity and self-formation, but also social-formation and the
relationships between the two, and asks students to pay attention to their
environment, and listen to what places have to tell us. It also asks students to
read the world and to decode it politically, socially, historically, and aesthetically. A
situated pedagogy attends to place, not only as the focus of student inquiry or

	
  

3	
  

academic study, but as spaces for performative action, intervention, and perhaps
transformation. (Kitchens, 2009, p. 240)
Those who practice situated pedagogy attempt to teach students to care about the local
spaces that surround them, in a direct attempt to promote a sense of caring about the
rest of the world—a world made up of countless places which work to shape who we
are, how we see ourselves in the world, and our hopes for our future (Noddings, 2005;
Fettes and Judson, 2011).
Overview of the Study and Research Questions
If the world is, indeed, global, why should we care about a growing sense of
“placelessness” in the policy and practice of education? I believe the answer to this
question can be observed in the places that surround us. As a child of the American
Midwest, I spent half a lifetime observing economic and social changes associated with
globalization. As the result of placeless, neoliberal policy which took root in the
economic sector, outsourcing, downsizing, and corporate disinvestment led to
deindustrialization, and the dismantling of local sources of employment and livelihood.
Three decades of this process have led to economic devastation, dramatic increases in
crime, homelessness, and environmental degradation in many Midwestern cities.
Among these cities is Factory Town, the setting of the current study. This ethnographic
study is intended to shed light on the pedagogical power of postindustrial places.
Taking place in 2011 and 2012, the study is based on a six month intensive field
experience with students and teachers in one Factory Town high school, and is
comprised of participant observation, phenomenological interviewing, and photo-elicited
interviewing methods. The study’s primary focus of inquiry, which developed

	
  

4	
  

throughout the course of the study, is the process of place-making (Fettes & Judson,
2011). Fettes and Judson define place-making as “an active, willed process… our
mental reaching out to grasp the possibilities of place, its past, its future, its meaning for
us, that really shapes [our] relationship [to places]” (p. 124). Two primary questions
have shaped this research.
What are the narratives of place that students encounter by virtue of living and
learning in a postindustrial city? How do these narratives, as they are read,
re(narrated), composed, and expressed in practice serve as processes of placemaking?
A second, but closely related question addresses the implications of place-making for
students’ sense of who they are and their commitments to their community.
How do students’ experiences of place in one postindustrial city influence their
sense of who they are, where they are, and what is possible for the future?
Filling Critical Gaps
In recent literature, educators who make place central to their work associate a placebased approach with outdoor approaches to education (Woodhouse & Knapp, 2000),
environmental and ecological education (Orr, 1992, 1994; Sobel, 1996, 2010;
Thomashow, 1996), and rural education (Haas & Nachtigal, 1998; Theobald, 1997).
One result of these associations has been that little work has been done that
documents place-based approaches to education in urban contexts. This study provides
a systematic exploration of place-making practices among adolescent students in one
high school, in a postindustrial city. The setting, and the study’s focus on place-making
provide a much needed contribution to the literature in place-based education.

	
  

5	
  

This study also serves as an extension of educational work done in the urban
Midwest during the 1990s. Lois Weis, Michelle Fine, and Julia Hall, among others,
documented students’ experiences of a changing economy during the process of
deindustrialization that led to the current postindustrial conditions in cities similar to
Factory Town. This study explores the experiences of working-class students in a
postindustrial context, and considers their perceptions of their city, and the implications
of economic change for their future. Unlike most of this body of work, I emphasize a
post-structural approach to thinking about student experiences, and apply a spatial
framework to my study. Nevertheless, This study serves a contribution by exploring the
generation who has never known a time of prosperity in their rustbelt communities.
Situating the Place of the Study
Given that space and place are central to the theoretical framing of this
dissertation, I begin with a description of the community where this research took place.
If you let yourself forget where you are, it would be easy to think that the term
“rustbelt” is a misnomer. Lightly rolling farm fields, fencerows, and patches of forest line
the 50 bucolic miles of interstate that link my university town and Factory Town, a
former automotive powerhouse that has come to signify the “rustbelt” to many
Americans. This all changes as you pass under an intersecting interstate highway
overpass. The road reminds you of what you had forgotten. When you clear the
signage to this massive thoroughfare, they are greeted by the towering white smoke
stacks of a General Motors assembly plant, and there is no doubt you are now in
Factory Town. The occasional rumble of graffiti-clad freight trains passes between the
plant and the interstate, but they are dwarfed by the hulking mass of the only remaining

	
  

6	
  

assembly plant in Factory Town. At the base of the plant stands “the block,” a large
concrete box originally built to house some form of utility infrastructure, but has since
been transformed by local graffiti artists into a public message board. Everything from
wedding proposals to cries for help--some that have been widely distributed via the
Internet--are posted on the block. The rumble of the freight train gives way to nearly
silent freeways--empty of midday traffic but for the occasional late model GM truck or
car making its way down the relatively lonely highways. Traveling further the interstate
infrastructure of ramps and bridges begins to grow, leading motorists to sections of the
downtown area. Though adequate for a city of a quarter of a million, the infrastructure
looms large and feels empty in a city that is half of its former self. Factory Town is the
city that produced the highway generation. General Motors (GM) executives
aggressively lobbied for a highway system that would be populated by their vehicles;
they bought up the Los Angeles transit system, destroyed it, and sold thousands of
buses to the city to replace it. Yet, Factory Town highways are now relatively quiet
reminders of an industrial past and an uncertain future.
Factory Town’s interstate highways tell the story of an abandoned city, a ghost
town of sorts. Much like the motorists on the highway I just described, media stories
tend to offer “drive-by” stories of a “city in collapse,” or the poster child of the
postindustrial. However, Factory Town is a much more complex community than a trip
on the interstate, a 5 minute news clip, or a 200 page dissertation can explain. There
are many sides to Factory Town, and the same trip I just described tells a different story
when we turn our attention to the other side of the highway.

	
  

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Down a grassy slope, across the highway from the massive smokestacks of the
GM plant, one can see the green of a manicured golf course, and glancing upward and
across the golf course reveals several 1920s era Mansions, some beautifully
maintained, others with hopelessly overgrown shrubs and boarded up windows. Also
atop the hill are two opulent brick school buildings, clearly built in an era of immense
prosperity. While most of the wealthy families that once inhabited these spaces are
gone, their legacy of wealth and power has carried on. A quick exit from the interstate
can take you into neighborhoods, which are almost entirely abandoned, but another exit
can take you into a thriving cultural center, which is home to museums, theatres, and
libraries. Each building in the cultural center houses exquisite collections of fine art,
industrial and political history, or state of the art performing arts venues. Factory Town
is a city of contrasts between the wealthy and the impoverished, Black and White, the
postindustrial and the bucolic, the past and the present, hope and despair.
These contrasts have come to define the postindustrial city in the era of
globalization. In Factory Town, a city profoundly influenced by changes in the global
economy, even the retraction of the auto industry, by all accounts a global process,
maintains local meanings for the young people and their teachers who participated in
this study. To purchase a foreign car is still viewed as an act against your community,
and supporting the farmers market is a way of keeping resources close to home.
Factory Town is a city facing countless economic and social challenges. For many,
these challenges have galvanized a powerful sense of responsibility to the local
community, and the fight for a better tomorrow. For others, the city has become a place
to overcome, an obstacle course to desires for social mobility. All of these aspects of

	
  

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the city make it a deeply rich context for exploring the processes of place-making, which
shape the community and Factory Towners’ perceptions of it.
Throughout the study, I remained keenly interested in students’ experiences of
their city and how, through practices of place-making, they shaped their perspectives of
who they are, where they are from, and the possibilities they had for the future.
However, I was also able to observe the teachers I worked with as they engaged in
infusing place-conscious perspectives into their American History curriculum. They
never used the academic terminology of the field, though the curriculum they wrote had
multiple similarities to Gruenwald’s 2003 fusion of critical pedagogy and place-based
education, which is described in greater detail in Chapter Two. The close relationships
and shared trust I built with students and teachers during my time as part of daily life in
the school and the community served as avenues for understanding student
experiences of the curricula of place inside and outside the classroom, as well as
teachers’ attempts to support student learning associated with their home town in the
American History classroom.
Whose Stories Contribute to Mine?
I attempted to negotiate entrée into three school communities in the Factory
Town area before the staff and faculty at Workman High School (WHS) welcomed me.
Each school or teacher I had approached in my attempts was hesitant for a number of
reasons. Because of its economic collapse, Factory Town has a long history of being
represented as a failure, a loss, a disaster, or a tragedy. Therefore, school
professionals who are working with students as they learn and grow in a challenging
context could easily meet a university researcher interested in the postindustrial aspects

	
  

9	
  

of the community with distrust. However, in my third attempt at making a lasting
research connection, I met Dan Carpenter, a Caucasian male, and his co-teaching
partner Amy Miller, a Caucasian female; their peers identified both teachers as
veterans, and their practices supported this label. After a brief meeting in which Dan
and I talked about our backgrounds and my research interests, he agreed to participate
and subsequently connected me with other participants inside and outside of Workman
High School (WHS).
Dan came to teaching through a powerful experience he had as a high school
student. The son of a General Motors executive Dan grew up in a wealthy bedroom
community not far from Factory Town. During his junior year of high school, Dan had a
confrontation with the assistant principal, which ultimately led to his expulsion. Facing
few alternatives, he enrolled for his senior year at WHS, where he now works as a U.S.
and World History teacher. Though he has degrees from two highly respected
universities, including a master’s degree from an Ivy League university that is globally
recognized as a world leader in education, he credits his senior year at WHS as being
the most significant of his educational career. He argues that Factory Town taught him
how to be “real” and to see past the boundaries we place around one another, racially
and economically. He has carried this valuable lesson into the classroom and places it
at the center of his pedagogy as an educator dedicated to infusing critical perspectives
into his practice.
My connection with Amy Miller progressed more slowly than with Dan. Amy was
not part of the initial conversation I had with Dan, and I did not get to know her well until
after I had observed in her classroom and we had several conversations as well as

	
  

10	
  

formal, and informal interviews. That gave us the chance to connect more completely
over time. As Amy began to open up with me, she shared that her life had been
different than Dan’s. It was clear, however, that each teacher’s path had led them to
becoming a critically-minded educator with a passion for helping students see
themselves as agents of change in the local community. Amy grew up in Factory Town,
the daughter of two GM line workers, and throughout her childhood faced times of
extreme poverty and hardship. She credits the Factory Town school system with
identifying her strengths and supporting her passion for theatre, which ultimately led her
to a local university where she completed a bachelor’s degree in theatre arts. After
making the jump to teaching, she worked in an exclusive private school for the students
of the wealthiest families in Factory Town. This experience helped her to recognize that
schools were not equal, and some students were gaining access to higher quality
education than others. After meeting the school’s principal, who eventually opened
Workman High School, she was invited to join the staff in 1992, its inaugural year.
Since then Amy has dedicated her career to enacting critical perspectives with her
students, emphasizing feminist theories, drawing upon critical theory to support
students’ awareness of injustice, and to arm them with the skills and knowledge
necessary to recognize how forms of power and oppression operate at societal,
structural, and institutional levels.
Throughout the process of data collection I also developed close, trusting, and
lasting connections with the 15 students who agreed to participate in the study. I came
to know most of them through our interactions in their social studies courses, through a
network of their peers, or chance encounters in the school or on a nearby college

	
  

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campus. All of them hailed from Factory Town or surrounding communities, and as we
shared conversations during and after class sessions I came to learn more about them
and their lives. Most of our interactions took place in the school setting, though I
occasionally spent time with students who were taking a break from class in the areas
surrounding the school. I learned in my early conversations with most of the students
that the school and the campus were places where they felt safe. In fact, several of the
students would meet their friends on campus and spend time laughing and talking at a
campus “food court.”
The nature of my relationship with students was largely shaped by my
involvement with their school context. Therefore, I chose to conduct our interviews on
campus, as this space was comfortable for them, and a place where they felt
comfortable with me. The relationships I developed with students revealed that they felt
closely tied to their community, despite their frustrations with the social and economic
troubles it has faced in their lifetimes. Like their teachers, students’ senses of who they
are were deeply embedded in their relationship to the local community, and to varying
degrees its relationship to the people and places beyond the city limits.
Plan of Dissertation
Chapter Two is a two-part chapter. It provides readers with a map of the
conceptual terrain of this study as well as my research methodology. In Part One, I
situate the study within the core literature in place-conscious education, place-based
education, situated pedagogy, and critical geography, while simultaneously considering
its implications for curriculum theory more broadly. Part One also provides an overview
of the theoretical and methodological elements of the study, lays out a “theoretical

	
  

12	
  

framework,” and describes the methods I used to produce data. Part one also
introduces three key “texts” which emerged as co-constructions—developed through
engagement with participants--during the field portion of the study, through the process
of data analysis and peer review. Each “research text” has informed the current state of
my thinking about the work presented in this dissertation, and was used as an analytical
tool during data analysis.
They include the following:
1. Narrative and phenomenological texts, or students recounting of their
experiences in Factory Town, and their perceptions of the postindustrial city.
2. Global education texts, or the ways in which my observations and
conversations with students and teachers align with current theory in global
education.
3. Critical and civic texts, or inscriptions of race, class, and power in the places
and discourses of the postindustrial city, and their implications for students’
perceptions of themselves in relationship to Factory Town.

These texts provide a frame of reference for the data analysis chapters, Chapters Three
and Four. In Part Two of Chapter Two, I provide descriptive snapshots of the community
and the school where this study took place, the participants in this work, and a detailed
description of daily life inside the classroom.
Chapters Three through Five lay out the argument that, students’ perceptions of
the space and places they inhabit are deeply intertwined with their perceptions of
themselves and their hopes for the future. Furthermore, I argue students’ processes of

	
  

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place-making offer fertile ground for promoting critical thinking, civic participation, and
social action in schools, practices which could lead to social transformation in
postindustrial places.
In Chapter Three: (Not so) Distant Memories: Longing, Nostalgia, and Possibility
in Postindustrial Place-making, I draw from Svetlana Boym’s (2001) theorizations of
nostalgia (2001), and Willinger’s (2007) explanation of “longing” as well as spatial
theories (Harvey, 2006; Lefebvre, 1976; Soja, 1996) to explore how students’
perceptions of social change in their local community influence how they see
themselves in connection to temporality. I theorize a spatial and temporal curriculum of
the postindustrial city, which consistently produces questions about the past, present,
and future of students’ communities, but also their lives. Sites inside and outside the
classroom frame this exploration.
Chapter Four: A Curriculum of Boundaries: Contested Geographies of Self and
Other, explores the policing of racial, class and geographic boundaries in the city of
Factory Town. Drawing from literature in diversity education, global education, and postmodern feminism, I explore the power of difference in how students’ perceive of,
challenge, and maintain boundaries between themselves and “others.” Students’
narratives of these tensions illustrate the power of local places in producing students’
sense of identity, and their position in the world.
The concluding chapter, Chapter Five: Toward a Globally-conscious Place-based
Education addresses the theoretical, pedagogical, and curricular implications for those
interested in the power of place-making for informing students’ sense of who they are.
Looking back across the chapters I consider the implications of how students in

	
  

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postindustrial communities come to learn about who they are and how they are
produced, and how they produce the places they inhabit. I draw connections between
the narratives that emerged as central concepts in this study and those that are
maintained in the place-based education and global education curricula at the levels of
policy and practice. I close by considering possibilities for blurring the boundaries
between global education and place-conscious education in K-12 practice and teacher
education.
A Place for Possibility
Throughout the process of conducting this research and writing this dissertation I
have maintained a focus on possibilities. At times the content of this work engages with
difficult topics such as racism, violence, poverty, apathy, and economic hardship. Any
social science research conducted in postindustrial contexts must address the problems
communities reeling from economic collapse must face. I do not deny these issues
exist. Rather, I have attempted to engage with them in a productive exploration of
possibilities. While postindustrial cities are plagued by many challenges, they also offer
unique spaces for rethinking our approaches to everyday problems people face in all
contexts. This study poses questions about current trends in education policy and
practice by shedding light on the power of place in shaping who we are, and the
absence of the idea of place in current conversations in education policy. Many
adolescent and adult participants, whose words make up a large part of this
dissertation, expressed their hope that their contributions to the study would serve as a
step toward change in their community. I have shared their hopes, and their visions of
possibility as I have written this dissertation. I hope your contributions, as a reader of

	
  

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this work, will extend the dialog beyond the pages of this text, creating places for
possibilities elsewhere.

	
  

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CHAPTER TWO
Mapping the Epistemological, Methodological, and Lived Terrain of the Study
I began to think deeply about the power of “place” in the city of Factory Town
while working for a year as a field supervisor for seven student teachers placed in a
Factory Town elementary school. During that time the interns I supervised taught a
standardized sixth grade social studies curriculum intended to infuse global
perspectives into an existing geography unit about international trade. Surprisingly,
though Factory Town’s manufacturing history is tightly connected to processes of
globalization, and its well-documented economic decline is commonly discussed among
its current residents, no mention of Factory Town occurred in the curriculum. As I drove
out of the school parking lot that afternoon, I saw a group of sixth graders who had been
in some of my interns’ classes that day. Their routes home led them past the massive
ruins of General Motors (GM) assembly plants, crumbling houses, and closed
storefronts. At that moment it occurred to me that students were exposed to two distinct
curricula, a school curriculum that deemphasized Factory Town as a place, and its
global connections, and a community curriculum that was filled with reminders of
powerful connections between local and global places.
Compelled by my experiences observing these interns and their students over
the course of that year, I set out trying to understand more about how students learning
social studies came to understand global processes, particularly globalization, from their
lived experiences inside and outside the classroom. My academic curiosity about
connections between “the local and the global” led me to this study and the exceptional
people who agreed to help me understand their experiences teaching and learning

	
  

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about globalization. However, through the process of conducting the study it became
clear that while students perceptions of place were powerful “texts” (Pinar and
Kincheloe, 1991; Pinar, 2006), which contributed to civic learning, globalization and “the
global” were less central to their understandings than the immediacy of the local
meanings they ascribed to the places they experienced on a daily basis. Though my
original understandings of global and local connections grew less pronounced, my
assumptions about a curriculum of “place” proved analytically rich and yielded
significant space for deliberation about the relationship between people, places and
pedagogy in the postindustrial city. As a result, my focus shifted from an emphasis on
students’ perceptions of “the local and the global” to a focus on the pedagogical process
of place-making.
I wrote this chapter with the intent of positioning this dissertation within a field of
academic literature, while offering the reader a detailed frame of reference for the who,
what, why, when, and how of this study. The chapter is thus divided into two parts. In
Part One, I position the study in relationship to other recent and relevant literature in
“place-conscious” forms of education, and critical geography. I pay particular attention
to definitions of these concepts and practices. After a description of my use of an
ethnographic methodology, I identify three key social “texts” which emerged from my
interactions with the study’s participants. I provide detailed explanations of how these
texts served as frames of reference throughout the analysis and writing phases of the
study. I close Part One with an explanation of the methods I used to frame a study that
would contribute to these emerging fields.

	
  

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In Part Two, I provide a detailed look at the people and places that contribute to
this work. I describe Workman High School, one story of its institutional history, and the
city of Factory Town in order to provide some context as to why the participants and
their experiences should matter to educators, policy-makers, and theorists in a reform
era characterized by a growing sense of “placelessness.” As Relph (1976) explains,
Placelessness arises from a disconnection from the spaces we inhabit due to our
reliance on digital technologies. Yet, placelessness also arises out of increases in global
flows of capital. We rely less on our immediate surroundings for the things we depend
upon. Thus we become unfamiliar with places we inhabit. This notion also applies to
policies that increasingly emphasis the movement of products over human connections
to the places we inhabit.
Part One: Place, Methodology, and Methods
Central Literature on Place and Place-based Education
“The last thing a fish notices is the water in which it swims.” A common
expression in English, this phrase serves as a good starting point for any discussion
about place. “Place” cannot be distilled to the equivalent of “water” as it used in this
phrase, though this is how we commonly conceive of its role on our lives. I suggest we
consider place differently. To this end, I review foundational theoretical and practical
contributions to the fields of critical geography, and place-based education. I intend to
use the literature of the field to draw attention to the social construction of “place,” and
the webs of discursive power (Foucault, 1977) through which it is maintained. Also, I
hope to situate this study in the field of place-conscious education. Following this brief

	
  

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engagement with the literature, I distill my use of some key terms and concepts, which
have emerged as significant to my analysis and interpretation of this study.
To say that we do not reflect on social space as a cultural product is not to say
that we do not inscribe it with meaning. “Rather, through repeated experience of
familiar cultural surroundings, we tend to develop an unreflective, unconscious attitude
toward place” (Casey, 1997, pp. 626-627). This taken-for-granted-ness is evident
across various realms of thought ranging from social theory to the typical encounters of
our everyday lives. As place-based educators such as Gruenwald (2003) argue,
“traditional education’s unconscious assumption that material cultural formations—
places--are natural and inevitable parts of our social and geographical landscape
presents considerable danger” (2003a, p. 628). Gruenewald continues, “…such an
assumption is dangerous because (a) it obscures connections between education,
culture, and place; (b) it releases people from their responsibility as place-makers, and
(c) it legitimizes the ideology that is embedded in the places we take for granted” (p.
628). Curricula that promote a sense of “placelessness” (Casey, 1997), therefore, limit
the possibilities for education to serve as a pathway to empowerment. Instead,
“placeless” education diverts our attention from the patterns of power we maintain
through spatial practice, and are imposed upon us through the social and spatial
practices of everyday life (Gruenewald, 2003a, 2003b; Gruenewald & Smith, 2008
Kitchens, 2009; Fettes & Judson, 2011). Understanding these connections between
education, place, and empowerment requires some explication of what I mean when I
use the terms “place” and “place-making.”
Place.

	
  

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It is beyond the scope of this dissertation to recount the many iterations of
“place” which have developed throughout the long history of Western thought [See
Casey’s The Fate of Place (1997) for an extensive genealogy of “place” in Western
philosophy]. However, given the multitude of conceptualizations of this concept it is
necessary that I explain my use of the term. The term “place” is commonly used to
define a specific space or a context in which events occur. It is precisely this unproblematized definition, which allows for the existence of a sense of “placelessness” in
the practices and discourses of education. Western philosophy, however, has given
consistent attention to the concept since Aristotle and beyond. More recently, critical
geographers such as Foucault, Lefebvre, Deleuze, Soja, Massey, and others have
begun to apply “place” to critical analyses of power and oppression in social contexts.
My use of the term stems from this, more recent, tradition of critical geography. It is
important to note that even within one tradition such as critical geography there exists
no steadfast definition of the term. The term reflects the diversity of places and the
diversity of human experiences of place.
Many theorists writing within the traditions of place-conscious education maintain
a distinction between the terms “place” and “space,” typically attributing place to the
emotional experience of a broader notion of “space” (Fettes & Judson, 2011;
Gruenewald, 2003a; Smith and Sobel, 2010). Instead, I follow the tradition of
poststructuralist critical geography, beginning with Bachelard’s notion of “intimate
immensity (Bachelard, 1958), through which he connects the concepts of place and
space. Using the analogy of one’s house and defining it as an “intimate space,”
Bachelard argues that from the intimacy of a familiar room we are capable of

	
  

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experiencing the full extent of infinite space, of “feeling at one with a world.” As Casey
(1997) puts it, “…in intimate immensity I enter space from place itself (emphasis in
original text). I come to the immense from within rather than on the basis of exteriority”
(p. 294). Taken in this way, the commonly maintained dichotomy of place and space is
problematized. However, Bachelard’s definition is not sufficient on its own for
explaining my use of the term place, for it lacks any clear explication of the connections
between place and power, more specifically political and social power.
Henri Lefebvre (1974), and later Edward Soja (1989) extended Bachelard’s
mostly poetic notion of “intimate immensity” by theorizing “the production of space,”
which ultimately became the title of Lefebvre’s seminal philosophy of space. In this
dissertation, I make use of Lefebvre’s assertion that people make places, and places
make people. In fact, Lefebvre argued that “social spaces” are socially produced (1974)
through acts of discursive power, which work to inform who we are and our “place” in
the world. For example, discourses can include or exclude, divide or bring together
groups of people. These divisions are reified within the spaces and places we inhabit.
Place, formulated in this way, can be characterized as pedagogical. As Cassie
Quiggley (2009) puts it, “as centers of experience, places teach us about how the world
works, and about how our lives fit into the spaces we occupy (p. 83). In other words,
people have an active role in the social and physical production of places. These
processes include the narrative production of place through discursive acts, which
inscribe spaces with symbolic meaning, as well as the production of place through acts
of physical manipulation, construction, demolition, art-making, and re-appropriation

	
  

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among other things. These acts are often defined as “place-making,” though I make
use of a more flexible definition of the concept presented below.
Place-making.
Fettes and Judson define place-making as the “the active engagement of human
beings with the places they inhabit” (p. 124). World-making and globe-making (LacueLabarthe & Nancy, 1997) “Whereas globalization, or globe-making, produces overregulated practices focused on the production of generic, predictable individuals who
are responsive to the forces of government, world-making begins with self-in-relation to
the other. World-making requires openness to new directions and possibilities as is not
mandated by governmental imperatives“ (129). Place-making is an active process, not a
passive one. A place exists because of our relationship to it. Fettes and Judson argue,
The passive knowledge that develops through frequent contact or second hand
descriptions and explanations may provide resources for place-making; however,
it is our mental reaching out to grasp the possibilities of place, its past, its future,
its meaning for us, that readily shapes the relationship. While this is clearly true
for human communities (Fettes, 1998)… [it] also holds true for the development
of ecological understanding of the world, a sense of the human world as part of,
not apart from nature—of mankind’s “implicatedness in life (p. 124).
As such, Fettes and Judson’s notion of place-making is a central aspect of my
exploration of the pedagogical power of the postindustrial city in the lives of the
participants. Places are pedagogical. They inform who we are, where we are, and our
sense of what is possible in our lives, the spaces we call home, and our imagination of

	
  

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the world. Place-making is also a central aspect of place-based education as it is
theorized and practiced in various contexts.
Place-based Education, Community-based Education, and Situated-pedagogy
In the context of education, place-conscious education is a direct curricular
response to the “placelessness” (Casey, 1993), which has arisen through the
promotion of standards-based education and social efficiency (Labaree, 1989) models,
which avert students’ attention from local particularities to generalized ways of
knowing. According to two of its most central theorists,
Place-based education or place-conscious education introduces children and
youth to the skills and dispositions needed to regenerate and sustain
communities. It achieves this end by drawing on local phenomena as the source
of at least a share of children’s learning experiences, helping them to understand
the processes that underlie the health of natural and social systems essential to
human welfare (Gruenewald & Smith, xvi).
According to Gruenewald and Smith (2008) five themes make-up the heart of placedbased education.
1) The walls of the school must become more permeable, and local
collaboratives, and support structures must be built and maintained so that
education truly becomes a larger community effort.
2) Democracy has always been a struggle for meaning and for change, and
place-based education must demonstrate to students the challenges and
potentialities of collective effort.

	
  

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3) An education in place must also acquaint students with the ways that their own
health and security are codependent on the health and security of everyone and
everything around them.
4) An education in place must not be tuned to nostalgic or homogeneous images
of the local, but to local diversity, the diversity within places and the diversity
between places.
5) An education in place must be an education in ethics. People need to be
aware of that which fosters wholeness and life, and that which fosters division and
harm. (pp. xx-xxii)
In another publication co-edited with David Sobel (2010), Gregory Smith explains that
place-based education is closely linked to “other contemporary efforts to connect
schools more firmly to their communities—efforts such as civic education, contextual
education, service learning, environmental education, and workplace education” (p. 21).
However, community or place-based education are the only terms that allow for the
inclusion of both the human and the “more-than-human” another essential element of an
education that helps students “grapple with the messy and cross-disciplinary nature of
humankind’s current dilemmas” (pp. 21-22). Here, the term “more-than-human” is used
to describe those aspects of life that extend beyond or individual experiences, such as
community engagement, or our relationship to the external world.
Implicit in the definitions put forth by Gruenewald and Smith (2008) and Smith
and Sobel (2010) is the element of “rootedness,” an idea applied to place-based
education by one of its pioneers, David Orr. Orr argues, “the preservation of place (in
our age of globalization) is essential to the preservation of the world,” explaining;

	
  

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A world that takes its environment seriously must come to terms with the root of
its problems, beginning with the place called home. This is not a simple-minded
return to a mythical past but a patient and disciplined effort to learn, and in some
ways, to relearn the arts of inhabitation. These will differ from place to place
reflecting various cultures, values, and ecologies (Orr, 1994, p. 170).
Orr’s notion of “rootedness,” commonly appropriated by the central theorists in the field
of place-base education is something akin to “citizenship,” or in this case a person’s
emotional, civic, and social connection to his or her home community (town, city, or
otherwise). Picking up on the civic aspects of place-based education, David Sobel’s
definition includes a specific emphasis on local forms of citizenship. He argues placebased education “increases academic achievement, helps students develop stronger
ties to their community, enhances students’ appreciation for the natural world, and
creates a heightened commitment to serving as active, contributing citizens” (Sobel,
2004, p. 7).
Definitions of placed-based education also tend to emphasis a porous boundary
between the school and the community, asserting that learning does—and should—take
place outside the classroom in the spaces and places of the surrounding community.
As Sobel and Smith explain, “rather than seeing teaching and learning as being located
primarily within the school, place-based education requires potentially all mature
citizens to take responsibility for inducting children and youth into the obligations and
possibilities of adulthood” (2010, p. 23). Furthermore, place-based educators tend to
promote learning that leads to active transformation of the places students inhabit. In
other words, the boundaries between school-based learning, and civic responsibility are

	
  

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concomitantly blurred in place-based education. Students are encouraged to act to
solve existing community problems, take civic responsibility, and act on issues that
affect their own community.
Multiple variations and iterations of Place-based education have emerged, each
serving to expand and enrich the discourse around place and its relationship to
schooling and learning. Community-based education holds many commonalities with
place-based education. One major difference, however, is in the centrality of “problemposing” aspects of education for community-based educators (Freire, 1970). This is not
to say that those who refer to themselves as place-based educators leave out these
methods (Gruenewald, 2003). Rather, I am saying critical pedagogy is foregrounded in
the work of theorists and practitioners who call themselves community-based educators.
“Community based learning helps students… develop the knowledge, skills, and
attributes of effective citizenship by identifying and acting on issues and concerns that
affect their own community. … These strategies create a pedagogy of engagement
(Melaville, Berg, & Blank, 2006, p. 3). “Effective citizenship,” as it is defined above, is
linked closely with “identifying” and “taking action” toward solving community problems.
These actions are central to theories and the practices of critical pedagogy (McLaren &
Giroux, 1990; Freire, 1970). These theorists and other leaders in the field assert that
education is “always political” and theorize students and teachers as “transformative
intellectuals” (Giroux, 1988 as cited in Gruenewald, 2003 p. 4) “capable of identifying
and redressing the injustices, inequalities, and myths of an often oppressive world”
(Gruenewald, 2003, p. 4). As Sobel and Smith (2010) explain, these problem-posing

	
  

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methods “demonstrate to young people the value of their own efforts and help cultivate
a taste for civic participation” (p. 25).
Like community and place-based education, situated-pedagogy is also based on
close linkages between critical theory and theories of “place-based” education.
However, as Kitchens (2009), explains, situated pedagogy comes directly from the
tradition of critical geography which he argues, “is concerned with working against
oppressive elements—like critical pedagogy—but addresses localities with a more
deliberate emphasis on the spatialization, or the ‘production of space,’ both in its
positive and negative characteristics” (p. 245). He goes on to explain that “situated
pedagogy does not merely exploit or endorse the given, but seeks to transcend it (p.
104), thus expanding the definition to consider the production (Lefebvre, 1974) of local
spaces and their juxtaposition with and against other spaces (close and distant). He
explains the core of situated pedagogy:
By situating education in the space of local communities, and by connecting the
curriculum to the everyday life of students, situated pedagogy allows students to
take part in the production of a conversation that creates new understandings of
the world and their place in it, and, furthermore, how they chose to act in it. A
situated pedagogy is interested in identity and self-formation, but also social
formation and the relationships between the two, between the self and social
in the process of becoming. It asks students to attend to their environment as
psychogeographers, reflecting on the subjective and the objective, the internal
and the material, with their bodies as well as their minds, and listening to what
places have to tell us. Students read the world, experiencing living landscapes,

	
  

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and decode those politically, socially, historically, and aesthetically, participating
in a remapping of those landscapes. A situated pedagogy attends to specific
places and localities, but not merely as places for discursive analysis and
academic study, but as the spaces for action, intervention, and perhaps
transformation. As such, it means that education is meant to move beyond the
schools and out into the world in an active, performative participation in the study
and reconstruction of material spaces in and outside of their schools as well as
the curricular landscapes of their education. (p. 240)
Kitchen’s definition of situated pedagogy, for which he draws heavily upon Gruenewald
(2003a, 2003b) and Gruenewald and Smith (2008), emphasizes discursive and spatial
practices and their roles in the production of space.
His definition draws particular attention to both self and social formation and their
connection to place. Kitchens’ use of the critical geographic terminology of
“situatedness,” expands the possibilities of place-conscious forms of education to
human/place relations that extend far beyond “local” contexts. While it would be a
misrepresentation to argue that “place-based” education does not consider this
relationship beyond the local, it necessarily begins with a persons’ connection to local
places. Situated pedagogy emphasizes the role of power in the social production of
place, and places production of the individual. In this way, situated pedagogy
intentionally draws attention to the role of regional, national, and global space in
shaping local contexts as well as the individual. These unique aspects of situatedpedagogy and those shared with other forms of place-based pedagogy serve as key
theoretical concepts, which have informed this ethnographic study.

	
  

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Place-conscious Education and My Use of the Field’s Central Tenets
Across the work of some key theorists and their definitions of various iterations of
place-conscious education, four key themes emerge: 1) attentiveness to the
pedagogical power of place, 2) emphasis on problem-posing/ critical pedagogy
promoting attentiveness to power as it is produced in local contexts 3) a deliberate
erosion of the social and physical boundaries between schools and the communities
they serve, and finally 4) attention to individuals’ civic relationships to both human and
natural environments.
Though none of the teachers or students I worked with at Workman High School
used the language of place-conscious education, my time there revealed that place was
highly pedagogical for students inside and outside the classroom. The postindustrial
landscape, civic culture, and discourse were all pedagogical for students as they
learned about their community, their connections to it, and its position in this era largely
characterized by processes of economic and cultural globalization. Critical geographers
such as Soja (1996) and Lefebvre (1974) emphasize that, although flows of capital
reproduce spatial power relations and shape place, culture, identity and other spatial
relationships are significant. Because of the ways I conducted this study, and my own
biographical relationship to economic aspects of globalization, the focus of many
conversations tended toward economic reifications of power. This emphasis on
economics was also apparent in the stories students shared, their discussions of the
community, and the lessons they learned in their social studies classroom, or the
American Social History Project (ASHP) classroom. That being said, multiple other
aspects of power embedded in spatial relations emerged as social texts, which informed

	
  

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my research. As Casey argues there are “many faces of place” (1997, pp. 286- 287).
My experiences working with students in Factory Town indicated the unique aspects of
life in a postindustrial city have a profound influence on how students conceive of
themselves, their place in the world, and their responsibility to their local community.
As the fields of place-based education and critical geography continue to expand,
it is important that they stay true to the poststructuralist and postmodern traditions from
which they arise while simultaneously expanding the scope and number of studies
which address the pedagogical power of place inside and outside the classroom. This
ethnographic study, framed by poststructuralist theory, was designed to contribute to
this gap in the field. In the following section, I turn to a description of and rationale for
the methods I chose.
Methodology
It is not a matter of starting from certain theoretical or methodological problems: it
is a matter of starting from what we want to do, and then seeing which methods
and theories will best help us achieve these ends (Eagleton, 1996 p.183).
We are all shaped by and we all shape the places we inhabit. Theories that
address the dialogical relationship between people and places (Soja, 1989; Lefebvre,
1974;Massey, 2004) can help to reveal how social injustices, global inequalities
(economic and social), and local injustices are socially and spatially maintained. The
conversations I shared with students and teachers at Workman High School, and my
observations of their daily lives revealed that the postindustrial places of Factory Town
are pedagogical. They serve as “texts” (Pinar 1991, 2006), which inform students’
perceptions of themselves in the world (locally and beyond). The powerful insights

	
  

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students gained by virtue of their relationship to the specific places of Factory Town
illustrate the need for research in education that is deeply attentive to the particularities
of place. The current ear of reform in education promotes curricula that tend to distance
students from their lived experiences of place. Thus, current research in this area is
necessary in order to understand the implications of the shifts, and identify solutions to
the problems they present. (Gruenewald, 2008; Pyle, 2008).
I pursue two interrelated subjects in this dissertation. First, What are the
narratives of place that students encounter by virtue of living and learning in a
postindustrial city? How do these narratives, as they are read, re(narrated), composed,
and expressed in practice serve as processes of place-making? A second, but closely
related question addresses the role of specific spatial contexts in this process. How do
students’ experiences of place in one postindustrial city influence their sense of who
they are, where they are, and what is possible for the future?
In order to explore these questions, I conducted an ethnographic study in which I
drew from three key texts. In the paragraphs below I provide a rationale for my use of
ethnographic methods and describe the three key “texts” that emerged over the course
of my time working with the participants in this study. These texts served as frames of
reference for analysis and organization of my ideas throughout each phase of this
ethnographic study. It is important to note, that though they are consistently present in
the text of this dissertation, I do not consistently draw attention to their presence by
directly naming them.
Ethnography.

	
  

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As ethnography, this study involves an “ongoing attempt to place specific
encounters, events, and understandings into a fuller, more meaningful context” (Denzin
& Lincoln, 2000 p. 455). In this study of “place” and “place-making” I have remained
attentive to Denzin and Lincoln’s notion that “human beings exist within the realm of
meaning as well as in the material and organic realms” (p.471). Meaning is emergent
from the material and social strata rather than a product of them. As Denzin and Lincoln
explain further, “one of the most important forms of creating meaning is a narrative that
attends to the temporal dimension of human existence and shapes events into a unity”
(p. 471). This study serves as one such narrative, but is also constituted of students’
narratives of their lives. This dissertation, like all texts, is multi-vocal and representative
of what Derrida would refer to as, “the intertext” (1976). The multiplicity of voices and
narratives which constitute the study have specific implications for me as an
ethnographic researcher.
Ethnography is a co-construction between researcher and participant, and the
social, spatial, and temporal contexts in which the study was conducted. Drawing from
the work of Crick (1982), and Davies (2008) explains “the ethnographic enterprise is not
a matter of what one person does in a situation, but how two sides of an encounter
arrive at a delicate workable definition of this meeting” (Crick, 1982, p. 25). Steier (1991)
furthers this notion, explaining the ethnographic process as involving the researcher and
reciprocators (not respondants) who engage in co-constructing a world (Davies, 2008).
Furthermore, it has been said that any ethnographic account is simultaneously a
statement about culture and the entire enterprise of anthropology as a whole. As Crick
argues, “Anthropology is a part of itself” (1982, p. 307). The postmodern and

	
  

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poststructuralist critiques of anthropology have led to important insights about reflexivity
and the co-construction of texts, but a point can be reached when this “spiral of
reflexivity” becomes counter productive.
I argue that any study that addresses the human relationship with his or her
environment requires an epistemological and methodological approach that balances
the empiricist argument that knowledge outside the realm of individual interpretation is
possible, with the necessary counter balance to this claim provided by postmodern and
poststructuralist thought. In other words, the ethnographic process can provide valuable
insights and understandings as a hermeneutical process. It is possible to make claims
based on ethnographic work, but the authorial voice, interpreting text, must remain a
central part of the text. Throughout the study I have remained attentive to my role in its
construction and the implications this relationship has for any arguments I present.
Three central frames of reference emerged during the data collection, analysis
and writing phases of this study. I provide a description of each below, and attempt to
acknowledge my part in the construction of these ideas in each description. These
“texts” have served as interpretive frames throughout each phase of the study including
writing and revisions.
Texts as interpretive frames.
Jacques Derrida famously argued there is “nothing outside the text.”
Poststructuralists such as McEwan have extend the notion of text to concepts such as,
“human actions and practices, social institutions, cultural artifacts, and the products of
artistic creation,” referring to them as “texts or text-analogues, that are open to be read”
(McEwan 1992, p. 64 as cited in Pinar, 1995). For example, Pinar (1998) argues

	
  

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“education functions, at least in secular societies, as a text that says something about
the things society considers sacred” (p. 446). Pinar’s use of “text” implies both a specific
piece of writing and an interpretation of the discourses that constitute it. It is in texts
that meaning resides, meanings, which are produced through layers of discourse
superimposed on one anther, “interlaced among each other, (in) layers of storied
meaning” (p. 446). In getting to know the participants of this study, and their daily
routines inside and outside classrooms, three such “texts” emerged as central ways in
which the participants engaged directly with place while learning in Factory Town; a)
phenomenological texts or those texts that informed participants’ identity in relationship
to place, b) global education texts or those aspects of life in a post-industrial city that
informed students sense of their community’s interconnectedness with the world, and c)
critical and civic texts, or those aspects of life in the post-industrial city which informed
participants’ views of race and class power as well as their sense of responsibility as
citizens of their city.
To understand the pedagogical power of place, then, required “reading” and
interpreting the texts places produce. Throughout the development of this study, I read
and co-wrote these sets of texts. Participants “read” and produced places through their
daily activities, actions, and conversations within and about them. As I have described
above, the emergence of each of these texts is also the result of my own positionality as
a researcher and co-constructor of this dissertation. “Barthes argues (1977) that a text
is a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend
and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of
culture’ (146)” (in Storey 2006, p. 98). Interpretations of such texts can only bring a

	
  

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temporary unity to them. The text “is experienced only in an activity of production”
(Storey p. 157). A text is a work seen as inseparable from the active process of its
many readings. This dissertation serves as one such interpretation, and intentionally
identifies the multiplicity inherent in each text. The reader is also involved in the
formation of this work as your interpretations of participants’ experiences and ideas I
share with you add to the multiple layers of interpretation that are inherent within each
of the texts.
Research text #1:Narrative texts.
The first and most central text which emerged during the time I spent in Factory
Town are the narratives participants used to describe (to me and others) their
experiences of living in the city, and the economic impact a postindustrial economy has
had on their lives. It is important to note that the texts I describe as “emerging” from this
study are simultaneously the product of the social and spatial context of a particular era
in Factory Town’s history, and a particular group of students. Most importantly, they are
also a product of my own positionality as a Caucasian, adult member of a school
community, and relative outsider to the city of Factory Town. Another researcher,
positioned differently, most certainly would have generated a different reading.
The conversations I shared with participants, some as parts of formal interviews
and others in informal day-to-day interactions, revealed that participants tended to use
stories to explain their experience. This was not surprising to me as narratives help
individuals make sense of the discontinuity and fragmentation that characterize the
experience of our daily lives. Clandinin and Connelly (2000) explain that “Life… is filled
with narrative fragments, enacted in storied moments of time and space, and reflected

	
  

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upon and understood in terms of narrative unities and discontinuities” (17). In other
words, narratives are ways of explaining (to ourselves and others) who we are and how
we relate to our spatial, temporal and social context. Margaret Sommers (1991),
describes these personal stories as “ontological narratives.” People construct identities
by locating themselves, or being located within a set of relational stories. As Somers
puts it, “ontological narratives can only exist in the form of interpersonal interactions
over time” (614). Therefore, they are simultaneously produced through interpersonal
relations, and embedded in our own sense of self. As such, their social production is
central to the social construction of identity. To take an example from this study, Lana,
a young woman who moved out of her African-American working class neighborhood as
a child, longed to leave the middle class neighborhood she lives in now. She missed the
close-knit relationships she had in her other neighborhood, and laments the lack of
those relationships in her new neighborhood.
Somers (1996) defines narratives as “constellations of relationships embedded
in time and space, constituted by causal emplottment,” or the social, spatial, and
temporal contexts in which they are produced (p. 616). Ontological narratives, like
Lana’s, are the product of stories that circulate at the collective level as well. These
collective narratives also reproduce ways of knowing. Narratives reproduce power
relations through nonlinear processes of communication, passing stories through
networks of people from macro-level, “metanarratives,” and traveling among and
between individuals, social and corporate media, institutions and back again (Somers,
1992). Sommers terms commonly recognizable narratives, which circulate at the
collective social level, “public narratives.” According to Somers, these “are the

	
  

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narratives attached to cultural and institutional formations larger than the individual, to
intersubjective networks or institutions, however local or grand, micro or macro” (pg.
619). In other words, Lana’s story of moving away is a product of a larger social
narrative about belonging and the loss associated with social mobility.
The terms “ontological narrative” and “public narrative” and the concepts they
present provide a lexicon for explaining various levels of narrative, and participants’
interactions with them. Somers’s taxonomy of narratives provides a way into the
complex webs of power dynamics through which narratives gain their power to inform,
or guide, who we are and how we think of ourselves in relationship to other people,
places, and times. In short, narratives are a way into thinking about how individuals
make sense of their experiences. Students’ narratives revealed their perceptions of how
they are situated, or as Casey (1993) puts it, “implaced” in the world. The notion of
implacement in place presupposes the notion of implacement in time, as well.
Research text #2: Global education texts.
As I described earlier in this chapter, my original intent in conducting this study
was to explore students’ experiences of “globalization inside and outside the classroom”
in a postindustrial community. Though the central foci of the study have changed to an
emphasis on the pedagogical power of place, its origins influenced the sorts of texts it
has produced. Furthermore, my own academic interests in the field of global education
and processes of globalization have had an influence as well. That being said, the
emergence of this “text” cannot be attributed to my positionality alone. Factory Town’s
prosperous past and recent history of economic decline were tightly intertwined with
economic globalization. As a result, aspects of this history live on in the material and

	
  

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social spaces of the city. As a result, students explanations of economic and
demographic change in the city are connected to globalization, in most cases, vis a vis
the social studies classroom. When used as an analytical tool, this text produced
interesting data which helped me to understand how students positioned their
community in relationship to the rest of the world, their perceived connectedness to the
rest of the world, and the ways in which the global economy shaped their sense of the
past and present in Factory Town and beyond.
Global Education is a broad field, and therefore I will delineate my use of the
term and my use of the aspects of field, which contributed to the emergence of this
“text.” Multiple conceptualizations of what global education encompasses (Case, 1993;
Kirkwood, 2001; Merryfield, 2001; Heilman, 2010) have emerged since its inception in
the U.S. in the 1970s. However, theorists commonly agree upon several components of
the concept: interconnectedness, perspective consciousness, and a sense that global
education goes beyond knowledge to include dispositions and an emphasis on personal
or social action (Hanvey, 1976; Pike, 2000). According to the National Council for Social
Studies (NCSS) position statement on preparing students for a global community, “a
global perspective is attentive to the interconnectedness of the human and natural
environment” and “in studying the traditions, history, and current challenges of other
cultures, the perspective consciousness of our students must be raised and
ethnocentric barriers must be addressed” (NCSS, 2001). This definition, and Tye and
Tye’s seminal 1992 definition are illustrative of the kinds of ideas, which have informed
this work at each phase of the study. Tye and Tye (1992) assert that any educational
practice that can be referred to as global education involves,

	
  

39	
  

1) the study of problems and issues that cut across national boundaries, and the
interconnectedness of the systems involved—economic, environmental, cultural,
political, and technological;
2) the cultivation of cross-cultural understanding, which includes development of
the skill of perspective-taking—that is, being able to see life from someone else’s
point of view. Global perspectives are important at every grade level, in every
curricular subject area, and for all children and adults. (p. 6)
Tye and Tye’s emphasis on the placement of problems, interconnectedness through
social systems, and the cultivation of cross-cultural awareness informed my reading and
analysis of students’ experiences in their Social Studies classrooms, and framed
questions I posed about their experiences within and perceptions of the spaces and
places of Factory Town. My questions about Factory Town and its history of
globalization, the ways globalization is talked about at home and at school, and
questions about students’ understandings of globalization all centered on the
particularities of place, and the ways place informed students knowledge, or obscured
students’ knowledge of global systems. In fact, the emergence of the “global education”
text required students to recount their perceptions of their own “situatedness” in the
world, their community’s positioning in regional, national, and global space, and
importantly the implications this has for their understanding of who they are, where they
are, and their sense of possibilities for the future. Thus, I have used these data that are
directly attributable to my global educator positionality to frame arguments about the
pedagogical nature of place throughout the dissertation. Critical and civic texts also
emerged as a central frame of reference in the study.

	
  

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Research text #3: Critical and civic texts.
I use the phrase, “civic and critical texts” to describe discursive and spatial
manifestations of power and students’ response to power and oppression in their
community. The city of Factory Town has been a site of various civic battles throughout
its historical trajectory. Race, class and gender were all salient aspects of the written
curriculum in the classrooms I observed. Social reproduction, power, oppression, and
injustice were common themes students and teachers engaged. They were part of the
explicit curriculum of the classroom. More importantly, signifiers of race and class
struggles are inscribed in the discursive and material spaces of the city. As a
postindustrial city, economic injustice and racial segregation are also explicit aspects of
the spatial curriculum of the city.
As a White male researcher in a mostly African American context, race was
rarely a topic, which was directly engaged in my conversations with students. However,
I regularly observed students’ engaging the topic in the classroom, and in their daily
interactions with one another. Thus, race and class power were narrated, read, and
represented in students interactions and engagement inside and outside the school.
My own work (reading, teaching and otherwise) inevitably shaped the questions I
asked and the emergence of these issues in our conversation when they did come up.
As I came to know participants, and they were more open about race, it became
increasingly clear that there were unmarked divides within the city. Students’ readings
of their city and its history revealed this text which informed my analysis of students’
comments and actions related to civic engagement, who was included, who was
marginalized, and so on.

	
  

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Each of the above texts emerged through a reflexive construction of meaning
that resulted from my conversations with students, as well as the texts and concepts,
which informed our ways of understanding one another. The three texts I describe
above are not the only social texts of the city, nor are they mutually exclusive of one
another. In fact, they are interrelated, they overlap and inform one another, and they are
multi-vocal. It is important to note that these texts serve as frames of reference for
constructing this study, but they may or may not be immediately recognizable to the
students and teachers who participated in this work. They are products of the
ethnographic process, and like all other texts, are up for interpretation. I now turn to a
detailed description of the methods I have used throughout each phase of the study.
Methods
I made methodological choices for this study stemming from the theoretical
framework and research questions. I explain these and begin by addressing the
selected participants. I then proceed to explain my choices of data sources and how I
went about collecting and analyzing the data. I also address the issue of my positionality
as an adult, Caucasian, middle-class, male researcher working with working-class,
(mostly) African-American participants from Factory Town. Hertz (1997) claims that by
providing personal accounts, researchers become aware of how their own positions and
interests shape their study, “from the questions they ask to those they ignore, from the
problem formation to analysis, representation and writing” (p. viii). In this regard, I
address the affordances and limitations that my identity has offered during the course of
my study.

	
  

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The data I present in this dissertation were co-constructed from working with,
learning from, and listening to two teachers and 15 students in a close-knit high school
community in a postindustrial city. A very short time after my initial visit, I was welcomed
as a member of the school community by students as well as teachers. Though I had
spent a previous year working as a university field-instructor at a Factory Town
elementary school, I presented my self as a curious and well-meaning outsider. This
approach seemed to work, as participants often took a pedagogical approach with me,
telling me about the community from an insider’s perspective. Over time, I used insights
gained from conversations to develop a working sense of life in Factory Town, at
school, and at home for each of the participants. Though my time with these participants
lasted for a brief, but intense, six months from early February to mid-July of 2011, we
developed a sense of trust and respect that provided space for students and teachers to
be upon and honest throughout the process. Participants trusted me to be respectful of
their experiences and do justice to their words.
During this time I achieved my goal of visiting Factory Town for three full days
each week. Most of my time on those days was spent observing classes at WHS,
talking with students and teachers between class and at lunch, or conducting interviews
with various participants on or near the high school campus. Most students made
regular use of their mobile phones to send texts throughout the school day. I typically
knew I was developing a close relationship with a student when he or she would offer to
share their “cell number” with me so we could text to arrange interviews, or answer
questions each of us may have had for the other. This mix of formal and informal
interactions allowed me to develop relationships with students which extended beyond

	
  

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the classroom and into a spaces where they felt comfortable speaking with an adult who
they associated with the school context.
Participants’ association with me as a member of the school community provided
certain limitations and affordances. Workman High School has been highly successful
in their efforts to develop a “familial” atmosphere within the school. Therefore, most
students had grown accustomed to having open conversations with adults and sharing
their personal points of view. When compared with traditional student-teacher
relationships, students at Workman viewed adults at the school as confidants, friends,
and, in some cases, siblings. Thus, despite the fact that I was twice as old as they were,
a different race than most participants, and a researcher from a well-known university,
most student-participants appeared to be very relaxed during our conversations, even
during more formal, semi-structured interviews.
All of the student participants attended the same small high school located in
Factory Town. Some of the students started their high school careers in this school, but
many came later due to a lack of success in one the area’s other districts, disciplinary
reasons, or school closures brought on by the city district’s financial woes. The school’s
1

population, and the students who participated were racially diverse (See TABLE 1)

.

Since WHS is an alternative high school, it accepts students from all over the city and
the surrounding communities. Therefore, students’ life experiences represented a
	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
1	
  The low number of African-American male participants is one limitation to this study. I
sought out the participation of some African American male students who volunteered
early, but these young men either chose not to return consent and assent forms or felt
they no longer wanted to participate for reasons undisclosed to me. Nevertheless, this
lack of participation is an interesting phenomenon that shapes the findings of the
present work.
	
  

44	
  

significant range as well. While four students could safely be described as “middleclass” based on their life experiences and the things they shared with me about their
home lives, the rest came from working class backgrounds, and lived in working class
neighborhoods within the city of Factory Town.
TABLE 1
Number of Student Participants by Race, and Gender
Gender

African-

Caucasian

Mixed Race

American

MuslimAmerican

Male

1

2

1

1

Female

7

3

0

0

Totals

8

5

1

1

Methods used when working with students.
In addition to the informal interactions I had with student participants, data
collection involved semi-structured interviews, auto-driven photo-elicited interviews, and
participant-observation inside and outside classrooms. More specifically, the study
involved a minimum of two one-hour interviews with each participant, which typically
took place on the Workman Community College (WCC) campus, or at Workman High
School (WHS). A third interview lasting from one to two hours was completed by 2/3 of
the participants. The topics discussed in this interview were elicited by a set of photos
each student took with a disposable camera I provided to them. Participants were
prompted to take photos of places in their communities that were meaningful to them
and/or that reminded them of Factory Town’s relationship to globalization. When we met
to discuss the photos, students led the discussion, usually by telling me general

	
  

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information about each photograph. I asked a series of questions such as, “Why did you
take this picture?” Tell me about this place.” “Who were you with, and what did you talk
about?” These questions, and others allowed me to probe without dictating the content
of the interview. With time, these interviews became informal conversations. Data from
these conversations was some of the richest and most compelling of the interview data I
collected.
In the first interview I asked students to tell me about themselves, and to
describe Factory Town. I also asked them to talk about how Factory Town has changed
in their lifetimes, and to nominate places in the city that might help me understand it
better. I also asked them questions about their families, and their friends, how they
arrived at Workman High School, and general questions about what sorts of things they
did. The interviews were semi-structured and lasted between 45 and 90 minutes.
The second interview explored students’ experiences with the academic term,
“globalization” and the subject matter of their Social Studies classes. These
conversations were typically more formal as they were somewhat disjointed from the
familiar tone I had developed with most students by the time of the second interview.
Though protocols were developed, the interviews often strayed from the
protocols and took on semi-structured or conversational tones. As my aim was to
investigate students’ understandings of globalization and social change within their local
contexts, I felt the conversational approach would avoid scripted or extemporaneous
answers that were disingenuous to the aims of the study, or socially “appropriate”
answers. Furthermore, the semi-structured approached allowed for more give and take,
and opened the possibility for participants to ask questions as well.

	
  

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I used the interviewing process to build upon the trust I had developed with
students, and asked them to share their stories, their perceptions about life, their ideas
and experiences in their community, and their connections to the world beyond it. The
data generated from this process revealed the power of narrative identity construction
as students’ ontological narratives were produced in relationship to the spaces and
places of the city. While conducting the second interview, I noticed that students
struggled to articulate concepts like “globalization” directly. However, auto-driven
photo-elicited interviewing provided a medium for students to express complex topics
that were difficult to articulate verbally.
Auto-driven photo-elicited interviewing.
As Harper (2002) puts it, “photo elicitation is a process of organizing interviews
around photographs” (p. 15). The assumption is that these photos act as a Rorschach
test, “that looking at visual symbols may trigger meaningful memories in an individual.
The meaning of the image, whether literal or imaginary, rests in the mind of the viewer”
(p. 15). After permission had been granted from parents, I provided students with 27
exposure disposable cameras and asked students to take pictures of anything, inside or
outside of the school grounds, that in some way reminds them of globalization or tells a
“global” story that is significant to their lives. The photographs that students shared were
used to support student-led conversations in which they would explain the photographs.
Auto-driven photo-elicited interviews are ideal for engaging young people in expressing
complex ideas in interviews. Clark-Ibanez (2004) points out the following challenges
associated with interviewing children: “children’s level of linguistic communication, their
cognitive development, the question-and answer setting, and the accentuated power

	
  

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dynamics of the adult interviewing a child” (p. 38). Clark-Ibanez (2004) argues photos
serve as clear and tangible prompts for interviews. As prompts, the photos can
elucidate the lived experiences of children in ways an adult researcher may not be able
to anticipate. Since theories of space and place are central to this study, photo
elicitation interviews allowed students to represent those spaces that are significant to
them with actual images. For practical purposes these photographs also served as an
archive of those places for future reference, coding and analyzing student choices. One
unexpected advantage auto-driven photo-elicited interviewing offered was a window into
students’ lives outside of school, spaces to which I had limited access.
Methods used when working with teachers.
Prior to interviews with students, and in between classroom observations, I
conducted a series of two formal interviews and many informal interviews with four
teachers. Only two teachers appear in this study, as the foci of my research questions
emphasized student experiences. Therefore, I made the decision maximize studentcentered data in the final write-up.
Throughout the process of collecting data I spent, on average, a total of 10 hours
a week conducting observations in two ASHP class periods (each lasted two hours), a
world history class taught by Dan Carpenter, and a prerequisite course taught by
another teacher, Theresa Province. Due to space constraints, this teacher does not
appear in the final write up. While the data collected from my observations and our
interviews are not directly used in this document, my observations of this teacher and
her powerful pedagogy nevertheless influenced my perceptions of the pedagogy I
observed in other classrooms. All of the teacher participants in this study are exemplary

	
  

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educators dedicated to promoting critical perspectives of history, citizenship and all of
the content material in their classrooms. More importantly, they passionately cared for
their students and worked exceptionally hard to support them as people with lives inside
and outside of the classroom.
While data developed from the analysis of interview transcripts has been
foregrounded in this study, field notes taken during classroom observations play an
important role in contextualizing interview data, and student voices within the
institutional space of schooling. “Ethnographic immersion precludes conducting field
research as a detached, passive observer; the field researcher can only get close to the
lives of those studied by actively participating in their day-to day affairs… experiencing
events and meanings that approximate those of the members” (Emerson, Fretz & Shaw
1995, p. 2). My time spent in the school context allowed me to get a sense of students’
academic lives, and provided opportunities for me to build trust with my participants.
Field notes and voice memos served as a space to voice theoretical insights, key
observations, and moments when I was confused or perplexed during my time in the
field. In short, they chronicled my own journey of exploration and development during
the course of the study, while simultaneously serving as a way to record events that I
deemed significant or worth investigating further.
Analysis.
My choice of methods and analytical process is informed by Interpretive
Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) (Reid, Flowers, Larkin, 2005). Data collection and
analysis are not intended to test a hypothesis. Rather its hermeneutic stance is one of
inquiry and meaning-making (Larkin, Watts, and Clifton, 2006). Codes were developed

	
  

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through a process of reflection and memo-writing, and were generated from the text as
well as my prior understandings informed by the theories described above. What
follows is a detailed description of the process I used to analyze and produce data for
this study.
Most detailed and systematic data analysis was completed after the data
collection phase, which lasted six months. The separation of an analysis phase from the
rest of the study is false. Throughout each phase of the process I was constantly
analyzing data, though not in a systematic and structured way. As Hammersley and
Atkins argue, “data analysis is not a distinct stage of research.” Rather it occurs
throughout the study during the “pre-field work phase… and continuing into the process
of writing” (1983, p. 174). When the school year ended and my last interviews were
completed, my data analysis process intensified.
Following the end of data collection and prior to systematic data analysis, I wrote
a series of seven analytic memos. These memos were based on key themes that I felt
were emerging from the data as I collected it, and as I was immersed within the context
of Factory Town and Workman High School. Only one of these memos—the one
emphasizing nostalgia--has remained central elements of the study throughout. These
memos helped me trace my own reflective thinking as I went through the process of
open-coding, a key part of phenomenological research. I also wrote brief 1 to 2-page
character sketches describing each participant in the study and some of the things that I
deemed significant about their personality, lived experiences, and our relationship.
In the first phase of my analysis, I also worked with a "peer debriefer, "which is a
disinterested colleague who engages in discussions of the researchers’ preliminary

	
  

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analyses and next methodological strategies in an emergent design. These discussions
made more explicit the tacit knowledge that (I) the researcher ha(d) acquired "
(McMillan and Schumacher, 2001, p. 44). By talking with this colleague I was able to
organize some thoughts I had developed during some of the initial stages of analysis
and develop a way forward with the themes that had developed through the process of
open-coding and memo-writing.
The process of writing early memos occurred concomitantly with open-coding,
beginning with transcribed interviews, and moving later into field notes. I regularly
revisited, expanded, or in some cases shelved my initial memos as codes developed
into rich themes or were unable to be substantiated in relationship to the data. I have
intentionally drawn attention to this evolution in the process as I believe it illustrates my
attempt to view this study as a simultaneously inductive and deductive process. This
process of analysis is “like someone who is simultaneously creating and solving a
puzzle, or like a carpenter alternately changing the shape of a door and then the shape
of the frame to obtain a better fit” (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw 1995 p. 144). I have
intentionally remained open to possibilities and problems throughout the analysis of this
data and the writing process, viewing each as an opportunity to think about the work in
new ways with the same information.
As writing proceeded, my openness to possible alternative readings continued.
For example, as I wrote I began to realize that I was consistently describing the work of
the teachers as uncritically good practice. I wanted to highlight examples of good
practice in global education, but I was leaving a large part of their stories out as a result.
While I believe these teachers are outstanding examples, they also faced numerous

	
  

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challenges and problems along the way. After a large portion of the work had been
written, I returned to the chapters and worked to balance my characterization of the
teachers to reflect the affordances and the limitations of their pedagogy for their
students in order to report a more complete version of the classroom context. As a
result, this realization led me to the inclusion of a section in each chapter dedicated to
thinking about locally relevant pedagogy in global education from a more nuanced and
critical perspective, consider both what was present and what was absent these
teachers’ pedagogy.
All of this practical and analytical work eventually led me to the three narratives
that frame this dissertation. Writing memos and drafting chapters served as
opportunities to look across the study as I sought out the big ideas that would link these
fragments together into a coherent text (Erickson, 1986) that would express what I
learned from reading and writing the experiences of those who participated in this study.
Addressing researcher positionality.
As a researcher, I recognize that I am entering into the process of representing
others, and making claims based on the things they have said, and their actions. It is,
therefore, necessary to consider my own frames of reference, biases, and internal
tensions which have shaped these representations and the claims they support. This
dissertation is my narrative. As such, it represents my understanding of the people who
agreed to participate in this research, and my understanding of their views on the
subject matter we discussed. It is also a representation of the work of other researchers
who have contributed to the fields of literature I draw upon to support my argument. As
such, it is my ethical responsibility to report on how who I am has shaped, and

	
  

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continues to shape, the framing of the problem, the processes of data collection, the
relationships I have formed during the process, my analysis, and the reporting I have
used to create this text.
Behind every study, qualitative or quantitative, “stands the personal biography of
the researcher, who speaks from a particular class, gender, racial, cultural, and ethnic
community perspective” (Denzin & Lincoln, p. 18). Therefore, it is necessary for readers,
as well as participants to have some understanding of “the relationship the researcher
has with the subject” (McCaslin and Scott, 453). In the opening pages of this chapter I
introduced my “research story,” or the personal experiences I have had that led me to
the questions which frame this study.
Throughout the study, I was never able to claim “insider status” with the students
or the teachers. As a middle-class, heterosexual, adult and white male, I was, by most
accounts, an outsider. Furthermore, though I had worked in the city of Factory Town for
a year prior to conducting this study, I had little knowledge of the culture of the city and
the ways in which it shaped the lives of students. My relationship with teachers was
somewhat different as I could easily draw upon our shared social identities, and my
experience as a K-12 educator to build trust with them. I was able to claim “partial”
knowledge of teachers’ lived experiences as a former teacher in an urban setting and a
member of the educated middle-class. However, with all of my participants I
approached the process of data collection from an “outsider’s perspective.” My aim was
to empower the participants to speak with confidence about who they are, and share
ideas that they otherwise would have deemed “common knowledge.” It was also an
attempt to build trust through honesty. I explained to them that I could not claim to

	
  

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understand “who they are, or their lives” but I was willing to listen and learn. This
approach was an attempt to disrupt what I originally perceived to be power differentials
between the participants and me.
Prior to entering into data collection I was concerned that my status as an
advanced graduate student would produce a considerable power differential with the
student participants who are younger and less educated than I am. On the contrary, as
an outsider in their cultural milieus, I quickly learned that they had their own repertoires
of knowledge to which I had little previous access. Participants’ insider knowledge of
the community, the school, and their peers placed them at the center, and me at the
margins of the imagined communities we were working in. While I never attempted to
attain a position in the center, I did move beyond the margins. This required me to build
strong enough bonds with students that I could be accepted as a legitimate participant
from the margins. Therefore, I built methods into data collection that attempted to
address this position, including speaking more frequently and informally with
participants outside of classrooms and interview settings, and I approached interview
experiences with a relatively informal approach by allowing the conversations to take
other avenues. This often meant our interviews were conversational and very personal
topics would arise. In those instances, I listened intently, sometimes offering advice or
suggestions, and other times simply empathizing with students’ stories, even if they
were seemingly unrelated to the topics of the dissertation. While this extended the time
it took to complete interviews, it also offered opportunities to connect with the
participants more completely than simply around research topics.

	
  

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The formal methods of data collection I used were also chosen with an eye
toward dialogical interactions. I chose to use phenomenological and narrative methods
that I felt would provide students with the opportunity to share their perceptions of their
own lived experiences. Nothing can be done to fully alleviate the power differentials
inherent in qualitative research, but if adequately revealed to both participant and
reader, they act as a point-of-view or channel through which to understand the
contributions of the work. Efforts to address my positionality have also extended into the
writing phases of the study.
Throughout the writing process I have attempted to “write myself” into the text
with the intent of applying the same why, when, how and under what circumstances
questions I pose to my topic and my participants (Rubin and Rubin, 1995). When I
present the words of participants in this document, I attempt to frame the discussion that
produced them, and as often as possible my reasoning for asking the questions I asked.
Furthermore, I have made every attempt to describe the participants of my study as
whole people with lives that extend far beyond the topics in question. This supports the
readers’ ability to understand who produced these ideas, and under what
circumstances.
As I stated at the opening of this section, this study is my narrative. With that in
mind, I have made every attempt to avail the reader of the dynamics that have shaped it
throughout each phase of its creation. In the following section, I extend my effort to
“place” this study in the physical and social spaces in (and through) which it was
produced.
Part II: Factory Town and Factory Towners

	
  

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Factory Town
The history of American cities is usually told in a linear pattern, beginning with
“settlement,” a term used to describe the expulsion of Native Americans from the land,
and the establishment of a European community. Then the narrative moves through a
succession of industries, which served as the center of growth and expansion for the
community, which eventually brings the narrative to “present day.”
If one were to tell a similar history of Factory Town, s/he would begin with the
“settlement” of the community in 1819 by a fur trade. Later in the 19th century, Factory
Town’s position along two major rivers, and between two industrial centers made it an
ideal location for lumber producers. The lumber industry funded the early carriage
making industry in the late 1880s, which eventually became the automobile industry in
th

the earliest years of the 20

century. Car manufacturers and the city of Factory Town

enjoyed unprecedented prosperity and growth until the globalization of the automobile
market in the 1970s led to General Motors Corporation’s nearly total pull out from
st

Factory Town throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Entering into the 21

century, the city

has a very small industrial sector. As a result over 50% of the population has left the city
since 1970. With one of the highest poverty rates in the country, Factory Town is
desperate to reinvent itself through new approaches to building a tax base.
What’s interesting about this narrative is that there is nothing entirely false about
it, though it is perhaps deceptively linear. I share this with you to illustrate how
narratives are capable of emphasizing certain elements of an idea (in this case a
history) while hiding others all together. Linear historical narratives inform how we make

	
  

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sense of the contexts in which we reside, work, and in this case conduct research. This
example highlights industry and economics above all other things. It omits the daily
lives of the people who lived in the community, and their contradictions of prosperity and
social change. It hides a history of racial segregation and “white flight.” Factory Town,
like all other communities, is more than the sum total of its industrial history. However,
its industrial history has had a profound effect on the lived experiences of the
participants in this study, many of whom have no living memory of a relatively
prosperous Factory Town.
Throughout the dissertation, I characterize Factory Town from the perspective of
a “social scientist”, often in economic terms. However, I have also intentionally included
students’ and teachers’ perceptions of their city, often multiple examples in each
chapter. These additions are intended to contextualize Factory Town in ways that a brief
history of the city or my detached depictions cannot offer. Furthermore, this rhetorical
decision was intended to highlight the fact that “notions” of Factory Town differ from
participant to participant. Thus, what Factory Town is depends upon who is narrating
Factory Town, and from what vantage points. I have provided a minimal economic
history of Factory Town above, but the various representations of the city that are
woven throughout this text provide a more complicated picture of the multiple narratives
of the city.
Workman High School
Housed in a relatively non-descript, brown brick building, WHS is almost invisible
to the surrounding community. While many in the community recognize it as a good
school, it does not have the visibility of the typical U.S. public high school. There is no

	
  

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mascot, and no signs marking the building as a high school. By design, the school
blends into the surrounding community.
Unsuccessful students from traditional public schools are either counseled into
this school by guidance counselors or apply on their own. This makes it a five year
commitment for students, as they must complete the coursework required for a general
education high school diploma while simultaneously completing at least three college
level courses. If both of these requirements are not met, a student will not graduate
with either degree. The schools’ stated mission is to “prepare high school at-risk
students for a successful work and educational future through the full integration of high
school, community college and world of work.” Yet, the vision and mission of the school
are captured more fully in the story of its founder, and current principal.
Mary Durant grew up in abject poverty in a rough neighborhood in the city of
Factory Town. Her mother, though poor, somehow obtained a set of encyclopedias that
remained the only books the family owned until Mary graduated from High School.
When there was nothing else to do, Mary’s mother required her to read from the
encyclopedia for entertainment. The books were symbolic of Mary’s family’s
commitment to seeking a better life for their children through the pursuit of education.
Her family’s support would eventually propel her to the college preparatory tracks of the
Factory Town public school system. She credits the public schools in Factory Town at
the time as offering “an equal education… it didn’t matter where you were from or what
race you were, everybody had the same opportunities.”
After high school Mary eventually received a degree in education and began
teaching at a private school in the city. At the time, this school charged very high tuition,

	
  

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but offered 50% scholarships to high achieving students who could not afford the full
cost of tuition. Though the scholarship allowed access to many students who otherwise
would not have received it, the schooling experiences of the scholarship students
typically did not add up to academic success. Observing this problem, and experiencing
it first hand, Mary wanted to understand it further. She entered a PhD program, and
during the course of her studies became interested in opening a school with a similar
framework to the one she had experienced as a teacher, but making this education
possible for all students.
In her new role, Mary sought to recreate an elite education for all students, a
dream that eluded the private school were she began her career. Mary was seeking a
way to “get underserved populations to the university,” which she felt would enable this
group to gain access to the power they could not obtain otherwise.” In other words, she
intended to open a school that did not charge tuition, allowed at-risk students ‘with
academic potential” to enroll, and then supported them personally and academically
once they were taking classes. Her aim eventually led to the creation of Workman High
School, where she remains the principal today.
Her vision for the new school was based on four key principles; 1) promoting a
family-like structure 2) promoting a uniform governance philosophy among all faculty 3)
promoting an environment where teachers felt they were academically invested 4) and
involving parents in the community process. These elements of her vision remain at the
core of the mission still. I consistently observed them in practice during the time I
worked within the school. Teachers knew their students, stood with them through
difficult times, and celebrated the good times. They worked closely to keep parents

	
  

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informed, and regularly prompted a similar pedagogical philosophy based on critical
thinking, community engagement, and locally focused curriculum. It is the final element
of this philosophy that produced a context that allowed me to consider the implications
for teaching a locally focused curriculum of global education as a core theme in this
study.
Elements of daily life in the school were not entirely unlike the archetypal vision
of a high school commonly recognized in American culture. Students’ days were divided
into hour or two-hour blocks of time, but they were spent in either high school classes or
“college classes.” Though there were no bells, students flooded the halls between
classes laughing, joking, talking, or holding hands with one another. At times when you
could see the school as a whole moving in and out of the classrooms, the student body
was markedly diverse, racially and to some extent socio-economically. Interestingly,
this diversity was explained to me early on by teachers who described the school as
pulling from rural, suburban, and urban school districts. In other words, though the
Factory Town area was highly racially and socio-economically segregated, this school
was integrated. The halls were filled with student art, giving life to an otherwise clinical
space with grey brick walls, small windows, and limited natural light. Two areas of overt
power were evident in the school setting. The first was the front office, just inside the
main entrance to the school, and the second was a police substation situated in the
middle of the longest of the schools three main hallways.
Under the surface, however, WHS was anything but typical. Because of a strict
“no fighting” policy, the typical “high school drama” as it was described by students, was
less visible. Furthermore, there were no major public meeting spaces were large groups

	
  

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of students gathered together. They all shared the same space or were able to disperse
more fully out onto the college campus. These spaces were less centralized making the
experience of daily life among peers less able to be broadcast to a broader audience.
In other words, while drama was occurring, it was less visible than is the case in large
cafeterias, commons areas, and gymnasiums, featured commonly found in American
high schools. Also unique were the location of teacher work areas. Teachers were
transient in most cases, meaning they had shared office spaces detached from
classrooms making classroom space more akin to the college set-up of empty
classroom filled by students, teachers and ideas, rather than “Mr. or Mrs. X’s room.”
Classrooms, then, felt ever so slightly more like neutral ground than the territory of the
teacher who invites students in for learning.
The school also organized the weekly lives of students around the aim of
“promoting a family like structure” at school. Each week students met with their “focus
groups.” When students enroll they are assigned a focus teacher who serves as their
academic “parent, or in some cases “older sibling” according to Dan Carpenter.
Students remained with this teacher until the end of their high school career, or until
they requested a change to another teacher. This helped students to connect closely
with their teachers, and teachers to connect closely with their students. Focus time was
typically spent working on service projects, talking about the challenges of life and
school, and thinking about ways students and teachers could support one anther. It was
not uncommon for teachers to bring food for their focus students. As Dan Carpenter and
Amy Miller explained, many of the students sought out focus teachers who brought
food, as they often did not get enough to eat at home. Examples of “authentic forms of

	
  

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caring” (Noddings, 2005) prevailed in the school, in the hope that this ethic would
extend into students’ lives outside of school as well.
Overt symbols of nationalism were recognizably absent from the school context.
No flags, pictures of presidents, or nationalistic slogans were present in the school, and
students did not recite the pledge of allegiance, or sing the national anthem during
school activities. A sense of shared community was emphasized, a local community
which extended outward into the city and beyond, but not an intentionally structured
effort to promote a national identity over other forms of citizenship. These efforts were
reflected in all of the Social Studies classes in which I observed, but none more
obviously than the American Social History Project (ASHP) classes taught by Dan
Carpenter and Amy Miller.
Student Participants
The bulk of the data collected for this study was generated through conversations
and interviews with 15 Workman High School students. Over the course of the study
these students generously shared their stories with me, challenged me to open my mind
to new ideas about their community, and shared experiences that make up the heart of
this dissertation. Throughout the chapters I introduce each student participant whose
data was used in the reporting phase, explaining aspects of themselves they, and I,
have deemed significant. I am hesitant to share a list of “profiles” for each student
without the context of a chapter to support them. I feel these lists are rarely helpful for
the reader, and do little justice to the complexity, and individuality they each brought to
this effort.

	
  

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Methodologically, my primary goal in this dissertation was to remain open to
understanding the ways students and teachers narrated their experiences of place and
what the implications of these narrations were for how they understand who they are in
the world. The chapters that follow chronicle this process of understanding. My hope is
that the data shared in the following chapters sheds light on the challenges and
possibilities of place-conscious education in postindustrial communities, and beyond.

	
  

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CHAPTER THREE
(NOT SO) DISTANT MEMORIES: LONGING NOSTALGIA, AND POSSIBLITY IN
POSTINDUSTRIAL PLACE-MAKING
Each student is in effect, “a pre’cis of all the past. For each individual is the
synthesis not only of existing relations, but the history of these relations.”
Antonio Gramsci. (1971, p. 353)
Gramsci’s quote frames the focus of this chapter by drawing attention to the relationship
between time and power. We inherit a set of power relations, which are intimately
related to our sense of who we are, where we are, and our sense of possibilities for the
future. Drawing on theories of “nostalgia” (Boym, 2001) and (Willinger, 2007), and two
co-constructed research texts--narrative texts and civic texts--this chapter explores
students’ responses to three important spatial aspects of their city: former industrial
sites, their neighborhoods, and educational spaces (a field trip to a public memorial).
Students’ explanations of these sites indicate that they are pedagogical, informing their
understandings of local history, as well as social change, and possibility.
Two questions are at the heart of this inquiry. How do postindustrial places
(brownfields, neighborhoods, and memorials) inform students’ sense of the past,
present, and future of their community? And, how do these places inform students’
sense of who they are (identity), where they are (positionality), and their possibilities for
their future and the future of their community (civic responsibility)?
There are three critical reasons why understanding students’ relationship to place
is important for understanding postindustrial place-making. First, the physical
landscape of Factory Town is dramatic. It is dominated by abandoned homes,

	
  

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demolished factories, and other inscriptions of economic decline. Second, students’
readings of places produce affective and critical responses that inform their sense of
identity. Third, as Fettes and Judson (2011) explain, “the passive knowledge that
develops through frequent contact or second hand descriptions and explanations (of
places) provide resources for place-making; however, it is our mental reaching out to
grasp the possibilities of place, its past, its future, its meaning for us, that readily shapes
(our) relationship (with places). (p. 124). In other words, place-making involves both
conscious and unconscious practices. Each informs our sense of who we are in
relationship to our location. For all of these reasons an exploration of students’
experiences of postindustrial places can lead us to insights about how place-conscious
practices can lead to powerful learning inside and outside of classrooms.
Defining Nostalgia and Longing
Nostalgia, as it is used in this chapter, is defined in collective terms, much like
the definition developed by Boym (2001). “It is about the relationship between individual
biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective
memory” (2001, xvi). “Nostalgia (from nostos – return home, and algia – longing) is a
longing for home that no longer exists or has never existed… an affective yearning for a
community with a collective memory… a defense mechanism in a time of… historical
upheavals” (2001, p.xiii-xiv). Boym elaborates on nostalgia’s ability to evoke visions of
the past and the future, which is illustrated below by Lana’s link between the factory
ruins, and her fears of an economy driven by violence and theft. For Boym, nostalgia
can develop “for unrealized dreams of the past and when visions of the future become
obsolete” (p. xvi).

	
  

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For Boym nostalgia is the site of interaction between individual and national
identity—or in this case local identity--and, consequently, individual and collective
memory. Boym’s nostalgia takes two forms, restorative and reflective (2001, p. 241).
Restorative nostalgia can be defined as a longing for “a return to the original status” of a
place, or a moment in the past. Reflective nostalgia “cherishes shattered fragments of
memory and temporalizes space” (p. 249). I make use of both concepts to shed light on
the power of nostalgia and its influence on students’ perceptions of their local
community, and their place within a global society.
Boym’s notion of nostalgia is helpful for understanding the backward-looking
sentiments and stories produced by participants’ relationship to place, but it is not
sufficient for thinking about how these places situate participants “in between” the past,
present and future. Expanding upon Boym’s reference to “longing,” Willinger (2007)
attempts to address this problem. She explains longing as “the in-betweenness of
nostalgia for a past and an unrealized future.” Willinger’s longing captures the affective
aspects of place-making, and the implications it has for students’ sense of situatedness,
identity, and possibility in the post-industrial city. She explains it like this:
Reflective nostalgia could either be seen as a mere sub-item in the discourse of
a dangerous nationalist nostalgia or – in other scenarios – it can come to
represent the emotion ‘longing’ that is not necessarily reliant on its troublesome
nostalgic sibling. Longing, I argue, is an extremely reflective mode, the selfdistancing aspect of which is at the core of imagination itself. Longing, then,
could possibly be seen as a search for the utmost range of experience. The
disposition or emotion ‘longing’ seen in such a light becomes an incredibly

	
  

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important experimental ground of our culture, and in fact culture in general
…From this perspective, longing becomes an oscillation between what is and
what could be. Longing is about savouring different possibilities, about swaying
back and forth in reflection, yet never quite arriving. (Willinger, 2007)
Throughout this chapter, I provide multiple examples of the (re)narration of
nostalgia and longing in order to express the multitude of students’ experiences of place
and time in Factory Town. The narratives presented in this chapter illuminate the
process of place-making, and students’ sense of how this process informs who they are.
At least partially, identity is constructed by memories of lived experiences occurring
within physical and social spaces, and animated by a notion of place. Three specific
kinds of places are explored: former industrial sites, neighborhoods, and educational
places.
Focal Participants
In this chapter, I present data that developed in conversations with Jimmy, an 18year-old working class Caucasian student from Belzer, an incorporated small town that
is directly adjacent to, and synonymous with Factory Town’s North-End. The “NorthEnd” is a predominantly African-American neighborhood which was heavily impacted by
“White flight” in the 1960s, 70s and 80s as well as the globalization of labor and the loss
of high paying General Motors Corporation assembly line jobs throughout the 1990s
and 2000s. Not unlike most of the participants in this study, Jimmy is proud of his
affiliation with the city of Factory Town, though he recognizes that the city faces multiple
struggles. However, he describes the reaction of strangers when he explains that he is
from Factory Town as one of “shock that I’m not a thug.” Jimmy is not a highly

	
  

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motivated student, but he does enjoy school and talking with his teachers and his
friends. A working class kid, Jimmy sees his future in Factory Town, but is not sure
about his plans after high school, though he does not expect to go to college.
Nikia, a 17-year-old, middle class African-American female student is also
highlighted in this chapter. An active member of the choir, contributor to school
gardening projects, and an athlete, Nikia is the prototypical “good student.” From my
observations and our regular interactions, she is fun-loving, respectful to peers and
teachers, hardworking and proud of her accomplishments. Nikia defines herself in terms
of her family relationships in many ways. She is very close with her stepfather, an
accomplished architect who recently opened his own church in Factory Town. Her
values are deeply rooted in Protestant Christianity, a powerful theme in her narration of
change in Factory Town. Nikia sees herself as a helper, and plans to follow in the
footsteps of her grandmother and teach elementary aged students after graduating from
college. As is illustrated below, Nikia deeply values education and sees it as the path to
success and reward, concepts that parallel a deeply held commitment to the
achievement ideology (Macleod, 2007).
I also share the stories of DeAndra, an 18-year-old, working class AfricanAmerican young woman in this chapter. Like, Nikia, DeAndra defines herself as a
“helper.” She is devoted to making contributions to her loved ones’ wellbeing,
community outreach programs in school, and she is active in team sports at her former
school. ,DeAndra is a unique participant in that at the time of data collection she was
preparing to relocate to Tampa to live with her father. This relocation was both a source
of stress for DeAndra, and a source of hope for something better. She was

	
  

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apprehensive about leaving Workman High School for a typical public school
environment, and she was also fearful of starting a life outside of Factory Town, the only
city she has ever known. Despite her displeasure with Factory Town, DeAndra held a
deep desire to see the city change for the better.
Elizabeth, an 18 year-old Caucasian female is another focal student. Elizabeth is
a hardworking student who imagines staying in Factory Town after graduation, but
working to make change for the better within the community. Elizabeth is hopeful that
change can and will happen, and regularly shared ideas about how she envisioned
these changes could occur. Elizabeth is a committed student, but refuses to make that
the center of her identity. Elizabeth is tough. She lost her father to drug addiction at a
young age, and blames Factory Town and the illicit drug trade rampant in her
neighborhood for this loss. Despite her anger, she has a deep longing to be part of a
“recovery” in Factory Town.
Less extensive, but no less significant, data from other participants are
presented in the chapter as well. Observations, excerpts from interviews, and
photographs from other students provide a detailed analysis of the narratives of
nostalgia and longing produced in the process of “place-making” in the postindustrial
city.
Reading the Ruins: Narratives of Longing Inscribed in Industrial Spaces
The gray of a Michigan winter, intensified by the endless swaths of brownfields,
and abandoned or sparsely populated neighborhoods that cut through sections of
Factory Town intensify the feeling of hard luck that is ever-present in some of its
neighborhoods. However, a spring breeze and the warmth of the sun can quickly make

	
  

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the grays give way to the crisp purples and yellows of flowering redbuds and dogwoods
that have sprung up all around the city in place of abandoned shops, parking lots, and
factories.
One particular late spring day, I was on the way to what would be my final
interview with Lana, a young woman with whom I had built a solid relationship over the
course of my time in Factory Town. School was out, the high school was quiet, almost
serene. Built in the 60s, the brown brick, mid-century building showed its age, but no
visible signs of wear in the streams of sunlight that made everything feel warmer and
somehow more hopeful. The building’s juxtaposition against the green of the grass and
blue skies took me back in time to a Factory Town I never knew, one that I had read
about in various nostalgic blogs written by Factory Town expatriates, heard about in
stories and constructed in my imagination. I wondered, as I walked into the quiet
institutional halls of the school to meet Lana, if that was the same imaginary Factory
Town that so many of my students described when they heard their parents talk about it
over the camera project I had assigned, or when we talked, in our interviews, about how
their town was undergoing social change.2 Was this imagined Factory Town the one
that had been “exported” along with all of the jobs students lamented, and the sense of
pride they had in Factory Town that they seemed to long for? I had been there long
enough to begin to understand that the past was not so distant from the present or the
future in Factory Town. The three could not be extracted from one another for Factory
Towners. Like many of my participants, I was being influenced by a sense of nostalgia
	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
2
It is important to note, that students often talked about the economic collapse in their
community without directly connecting it to processes of globalization. Rather, they
describe the community as “changing,” which was typically described in terms of a
decline in quality of life. However, some students identified changes such as downtown 	
  
	
  

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for something I only knew from reading the space of the city, bits of conversations,
grainy film and black and white photographs. Suffering from a minor case of nostalgia, I
walked inside, and sat down to talk with Lana.
I had asked Lana to take a series of photographs depicting places in Factory
Town that fit one or both of the following criteria: a) they were personally meaningful to
her, or b) they made her think about the concept of globalization. Lana explained that
when she told her Dad about the project he quickly hopped in the car with her and they
proceeded to drive around town to take pictures. One of their first stops, a few blocks
from their comfortable home in a middle-class neighborhood, was the former site of the
Delphi Eastside plant, a massive industrial complex devoted to the production of
automotive components for Buicks and Chevrolets built down the road at the Buick City
3

and Chevy in the Hole mega-factories . After several minutes, Lana flipped through the
photographs and displayed the picture in figure 1.

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
3
The names “Chevy in the Hole” and “Buick City” are not official place names. They
were the names people from gave to the massive factories that arose on these sites.
Though the factories have long disappeared, the empty lots that remain have
maintained the same names. Though students did not regularly reference these sites in
their daily interactions with one another, they recognized the names when I used them
and could recount experiences associated with them.
	
  

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Figure 1
Delphi Site as Photographed by Lana.
For interpretation of the references to color in this and all other figures, the reader is
referred to the electronic version of this dissertation.

Lana: That’s Delphi. It’s not there anymore.
Aaron: Yeah?
Lana: My granddaddy and some of my aunties used to work there and I think
when that left, that was like big depression. Like it was so many people… I think
my Daddy worked there… but I think he quit or something. I don’t know what
happened. He stopped working there before they closed. But that’s like even, like
that’s depressing to even look at… You’re walking, going down the street and
then, you know, it’s KFC right here, bank over there, dollar store, nothing. Just
the gate going around a big area where something could be. Like my mama says
they should put a big old playground but I don’t think they should put a

	
  

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playground there because stuff that’s there. They’ve got all that rubbish there.
People, even people that’s really depressed about it, they’d probably just look at
it and just be depressed all over again…cuz they know that it’s not coming back.
Aaron: Do you remember when it was there?
Lana: Uh huh
Aaron: Yeah? When did it, when did they tear it down?
Lana: I don’t know. I know they, they left it there for a little while though. It was
there for a while. Then all of a sudden, it was gone and just big piles of trash.
Like whoa. What happened?
Aaron: So you said it’s depressing to even look at it. Why?
Lana: Because it’s like nothing. Like nothing. I don’t know. Just nothing there.
Like well, for me, it’s depressing to look at because I know the people who used
to work there and they probably struggling, trying to work at Wal-Mart or
something. And it’s like, Factory Town got so many tore down buildings and
houses and all that stuff. It’s like we’re not building up. We’re just tearing stuff
down. Like we’re not trying to upgrade anything. We’re just letting it all go.
People have no pride in what we have no more if it look like that...and they
wonder why people run the streets, stealing. It’s gonna be crazy in a few years, I
think…
Apparent throughout Lana’s narrative is a sense of loss associated with a past that she
is able to partially reconstruct through fragments of knowledge about a place and time
she never knew until it was already gone or was on its way out in a slow, decline and
closure process that lasted over a decade. Lana’s construction of the past is influenced

	
  

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by multiple narrators including the physical space of the Delphi brownfield and its
surroundings, her father’s contributions to the photograph, his stories of what the site
used to be to so many people, and her knowledge of the economic and social history of
Factory Town as it is narrated in the ASHP classroom with Mr. Carpenter and Mrs.
Miller.
Multiple narrations of the past are “pedagogical” in the sense that each--the
space, the parent, and the classroom--contribute to Lana’s sentiments and knowledge
about the past, her perception of the present, and her predictions for the future. Evident
in Lana’s forward projections of Factory Town is that hope seems to be lost and the
destruction of factories and the physical scars that remain in their place become more
justification for what she sees as the ongoing problems in Factory Town. A sense of
longing is intertwined with the memories, frustration with the present, and visions of the
future that Lana shares. The photograph of the brownfield, and Lana’s explanation
produce an in-between-ness of temporality. This in-between-ness manifests in a sense
of longing for a return to a community with more opportunities for more people, a
longing to leave, and a nostalgia for a constructed and collective past.
Other students read the postindustrial spaces of Factory Town in similar ways to
Lana. I met the vast majority of the students with whom I worked at Workman High
School while observing their classes, but my conversations with a few students, like
Jimmy, were spontaneous and occurred during chance meetings in hallways or during
lunch, and through general communication with other participants. Jimmy asked me to
interview him. He seemed curious and enthusiastic about the opportunity, so we
planned to meet the following day. When I asked Jimmy to talk about how Factory Town

	
  

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had changed overtime, he talked about the loss of GM jobs that was commonly
discussed with students, but primarily focused on his neighborhood until I began
4

walking him through the camera project. Then he nominated his first picture.
I can already think of one picture I want to take. You know (the freeway exit)
northbound right after the highway makes that left turn? You know the train
tracks? And if you’re standing on the northbound side of the curve and looking
out at the train tracks, you see a junkyard, and then you see the steam towers. I
know sometimes, it’s usually in late fall, early winter, the sun will be rising over
there ‘n you could get the steam coming out of the towers and the trains. Now
that would be the perfect picture of Factory Town with the trains, for like the
export of cars, the scrap yard for cars, and then the factory. And the interesting
thing is, on the inside of that corner there used to be a factory there and it’s tore
down now, just acres and acres of just open concrete [Buick world headquarters].
…When I was like five there used to be these two massive smoke stacks and
they imploded ‘em. That was such a huge deal ‘cause you could see ‘em for like
miles and miles around. I don’t know, I think it started hittin’ everybody what was
happenin’ at that point.
To Jimmy, this image that he passes and at some level is part of his
consciousness, the landscape of a rail track and the junkyards, depicts a public
narrative of the ups and downs of economics related to the global flow of capital, at
least through “export.” For most of Factory Town’s residents the downs have
outweighed the ups for the better part of the last three decades. Jimmy’s reference to
	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
4	
  I used this term to describe the auto-driven photo elicited interviewing method I
employed in the study
	
  

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the smoke stacks connects this story to a collective history of Factory Town. It was a
communal moment in which many people felt a deep trauma. Unlike Lana’s depiction of
the Delphi site, Jimmy’s description of this “turning point” is informed by a reflective
nostalgia. The image is a fragment of the past, which informs his vision for the future.
He closes his story with, “everyone knew what was happenin’ at that point,” implying
that the world had changed and the jobs they had counted on for generations were
never coming back. Although Jimmy has only been alive for eighteen years of the
economic collapse of Factory Town, he connects to the collapse by virtue of his
connection to the former industrial spaces of the city and the history inscribed upon
them. In this sense, these spaces maintain these links to the past.
He goes on to recount his experience of the day the towers were imploded.
That day, from my Dad’s apartment, I just happened to be looking out the window
and you could just kinda see ‘em just go, (motions slowly downward with his
hand and forearm mimicking the collapse of the towers). Nobody talks about that
anymore, but it matters to me. I just don’t think anyone cares, really.
Though Jimmy describes the absence of conversation about the day the towers fell
down, those sentiments are retained more vividly today in the silences he describes at
the end of his quote. The collapse of Factory Town has become a memory for Jimmy
and for others, but that memory shapes his present in important ways. Jimmy’s
memory--situated in a specific place and time--shapes how he thinks about Factory
Town’s situatedness in the world. In his description of the rail yard, and his recounting of
the towers, Jimmy consistently returns to the collapse of Factory Town’s economy, a

	
  

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series of events that removed it from the center of automobile production, and placed it
squarely on the economic periphery as a postindustrial city.
Like Jimmy and Lana, Elizabeth describes the physical narration of decline in the
industrial “ruins” of the city. She describes three closed sections of the General Motors
assembly, the same factory described in the opening pages of the dissertation.
There is like three parts of GM that are not being used and so it’s just all empty,
and then you see, on the other side, when you get farther down Bristol where
there’s cars and everybody’s parked again, that’s where they’re at. But they’re,
those buildings when I was younger were all used. I remember driving by there
and if it was time for people to be getting out of work, you were gonna be waiting
for a long time and now it’s not like that. Like they have traffic lights for when it
used to be busy like that and now they just are blinking yellow lights because
they don’t need them.
I asked her to elaborate on how her experiences with these spaces made her feel or
what it made her think about. She responded,
Sad. I really wish that we could use all the things that we have here. Somebody
could open (the closed sections of the plant) and reopen everything. I think that
would bring jobs here but with the way that everything’s industrialized, we don’t
need as much as we had. But I wish, I wish they would open it. It’d be nice. It
would bring a lot of jobs back and then people wouldn’t have to complain about
how many jobs we don’t have. Yeah, I think, I think in the long run, I think that
money will be back in Factory Town. It’ll just take time to get there.

	
  

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Not surprisingly, Elizabeth’s affective response to the changes resulting from job loss is
sad. Like Lana, who described the “nothing”-ness that characterizes the Delphi site,
Elizabeth identifies absences and empty spaces left behind by the people who once
inhabited them. Once packed roadways have given way to blinking caution lights, and
once-busy factories are boarded up. Elizabeth reads these voids with longing. She
simultaneously remembers the productivity of the past, and longs for a similar future.
She imagines opening up factories, and putting people back to work. She expresses her
confidence that prosperity will return to Factory Town. Less hopeful, Lana and Jimmy
read these spaces through the lenses of reflective nostalgia, or a longing for a collective
past. All three read these spaces with the past, present and future in mind, however.
This simultaneity of the temporal is foregrounded in the postindustrial landscape of
Factory Town.
Globalization, and the spread of neoliberal economics have led many city
governments to “recapitalize the economic landscapes of their cities” (Macleod, G., p.
602) in an effort to “revitalize” their downtown spaces, abandoned industrial complexes,
and gentrify ethnic and “ghettoized” sections of residential neighborhoods. Due primarily
to a nearly complete private and public disinvestment, these sections of Factory Town
have remained largely unimproved. They have been left to the elements, arsonists, and
vandals for as many as four decades. This lack of reaestheticization, or the
concealment of deindustrialized spaces, which point to increasing economic and social
injustice and inequality (Macleod, G. 2002) differentiates Factory Town from cities who
th

suffered similar economic changes in the latter half of the 20

century. Former

industrial cities throughout the United States and Western Europe have undergone

	
  

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partial reastheticization efforts including Pittsburgh, New York’s Lower-East Side,
Glasgow’s Buchannan Street, and more recently Detroit’s Midtown. Therefore, students
like Lana, Jimmy, and Elizabeth read the in-between-ness of temporality these spaces
produce. Students’ responses to these spaces result in two different kinds of longing,
nostalgia for the opportunity available in a former Factory Town, or longing for a Factory
Town, which provides these opportunities. Either way, the spaces are partially involved
in the ways students develop a sense of civic responsibility to their community, their
situatedness in space and time, and their sense of hope for the future of their
community.
The process of place-making, which I have detailed above, is dialogic. Places
produce us, and we produce places through our narrations of them. My emphasis to this
point in the chapter has been on the pedagogical power of place. In the following
section I explore students’ experiences of residential places. In this section, I maintain
an emphasis on the pedagogical power of place, but expand it by exploring the
discursive element of place-making. As was the case with my account of Lana’s trip to
the Delphi site, I include students’ narrations of their parents’ role in shaping their civic
and personal connections to their neighborhoods, and the city they call home.
Reading the Residential: Nostalgia and Longing Close to Home
Nikia, who has lived in a predominantly African-American and high poverty
section of Factory Town for the past 9 years, describes a once beautiful home on her
block. It is stately with tall white pillars and a large front porch. The house is a place she
thinks of that encapsulates her sense of her city. (See Figure 2)

	
  

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I don’t like Factory Town, but there are some historical… some really pretty
buildings I’d hate to see like torn down in Factory Town. It’s a house on Clemens.
I don’t know the address but it’s on Clemens and it has these pillars. Every time I
pass it, I just think of like the White House or something. It’s just so pretty….
when I look at the houses, I think about if that was built a long time ago, then this
place could’ve been nothing like it is now. Cuz like why would you build a house
that pretty in like a devastated area?
The house Nikia is referring to is abandoned (Figure 2), like 33% of all of the other
structures in the city of Factory Town. For Nikia, along with almost all of the students
Figure 2
Nikia’s Photograph of a House with White Pillars

who participated in this study, the presence of abandoned homes begs for narrative
explanations of the changes that led to the current state of their physical space. How
	
  

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did that house fall apart? Who were the inhabitants and where are they now? What are
the implications of these changes for me now and in the future? In Nikia’s case, her
questions also include the question, “what can we do about this?” She goes on to
describe her hope to change Factory Town for the better.
And when I look at the houses that’s there, it’s like, okay, maybe if we like dusted
this off or repainted this, it’d be like perfect again.
Furthermore, her father pointed out the significance of the fact that so many homes are
abandoned and places an emphasis on this moment as historical, indicating that the
conditions of these homes were symptomatic of a larger economic crisis hitting the
entire country. Nikia recalls that conversation below.
And we was riding down the street, my dad was like ‘you’re seeing history being
made right now because I never seen this many empty houses before in my life.’
Like if Factory Town made a dollar for every empty house, we would at least be
able to help some schools reopen.…
At the point, I asked Nikia to explain more about what she had meant when she talked
about how Factory Town has changed since those houses were built. She explained,
Some of it, I briefly remember when I was little, but it was like, okay, the
promised land. How I would explain it because how my grandmother explains it
to me. She was from Mississippi and my grandma’s like 80 so she’s old. And
when she got her teaching degree, they wouldn’t let her teach in Mississippi
because of segregation, all that stuff, and like her and her family was like, “oh,
we’re gonna go to Factory Town. We’re gonna start over. We’re gonna have a
big grand life.” And then it reminded me of like when the slaves ran away north.

	
  

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You know, and the Hebrew children to try to get to the Promised Land. That’s
what it makes me think about. Like this great place that you should go to.
Nikia’s narrative, not surprisingly, is not only constructed by the spatial curriculum of
living on the North-End, it is also comprised of fragments of religious, personal and
group histories that inform her understanding of change over time, and the implications
of those changes for her future. She connects the religious narrative of the “Promised
Land,” to her own family’s movement from the South to Factory Town in search of
economic and social freedoms they were not afforded in Mississippi. These are
powerful narratives that support group cohesion and explain the ongoing struggle for
equality of opportunity that many African-Americans still encounter in a racially divided
society. Thus, these themes inform her understanding of social and economic change
in Factory Town, and the implications of its decline, not only in terms of economic
opportunity, but also in terms of the sacrifice and the subsequent losses of her
grandmother, and the African-American community in Factory Town. This sense of loss
fuels the intensity of Nikia’s longing for a time when struggle wrought reward, and
opportunities were expanding for people like her. According to Nikia, economic
opportunity seems limited in Factory Town. Yet, education, and the promise of a college
degree provide hope for her. Soon after she imagined Factory Town as a lost promised
land, she added that Workman High School was a chance for salvation.
Yeah, I think it was just more jobs. Opportunity. Kinda like Workman High
School. Like opportunity for somebody to (say) hey… all’s you gotta do is learn
this. You can get you a job. You can get you a degree. Just come do it. Like it
was easy, when I think about all the people that have retired from GM, it was

	
  

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almost like they was handing out jobs. Cuz everybody I know, their grandfather
worked at GM, their grandmother worked at GM, their auntie… it’s something,
just about everybody family that I know that worked at GM.
Without prompting Nikia to talk about the abandoned house she described above, she
explained how this space informed her deeply embedded connections to Factory Town.
In the above excerpt, Nikia narrates the history of her family and their motivation for
resettling in Factory Town. Nikia’s imagination of a former Factory Town is deeply tied
to her sense of who she is. Nikia was eager to share the contributions her family
members had made to Factory Town in the past. In doing this, she drew particular
attention to her grandmother’s accomplishments as one of the first African American
school teachers in the city. Nikia’s family legacy linked her to the past, and the
abandoned homes that dominate her neighborhood are reminders of this time. While
Nikia associates these homes with a sense of loss, she also associates them with a
sense of pride in herself.
Though Nikia recognizes that General Motors offered a “promised land” full of
opportunity for many people in the past, she is confident that education provides a
similar reward today. To Nikia, though Factory Town has lost a lot, she remains hopeful
that all is not lost. Expanding upon her hope in education, Nikia describes a
convocation held in the Workman High School auditorium intended to honor some of the
graduating class.
And the kids was standing up there [saying], I got two associates. Like personally
for me is like the first high school students I know that got two Associate’s
Degrees, that’s gonna go off to college and like two times ahead of the game.

	
  

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Two associate’s he done talked about one, but like he had two and I know one of
the boys, I think either have three or had two and some credits.
Though education is seen as the “promised land” for Nikia, it remains to be seen if this
ticket will lead to success on the job market. In Factory Town, the prospects of finding a
professional career are slim and many students, even if they are successful, struggle to
find work close to home. Thus, young people are presented with a dicey proposition.
They can stay in Factory Town and fight to make it a socially richer and safer
community; Or, leave in search of gaining access to the global knowledge economy
through further schooling. Thus far, Nikia has opted for the latter hoping to attend
college and perhaps relocate to another community upon graduation. Unlike Jimmy and
Lana, Nikia’s reading of the postindustrial is relatively optimistic. She imagines a former
“promised land,” highlighting the economic and social opportunities the city provided for
her family. Her optimistic outlook also informs her vision for the future. It is difficult to
speculate where Nikia’s optimism originates, though it is clear from the stories she
shared of her trailblazing grandmother, and her admiration for her well-educated and
optimistic father that family histories have shaped her vision of what is possible in
challenging times. As she reads the spaces of the city, she is reminded of their
accomplishments, but she is also reminded of the lack of opportunity that exists in
Factory Town. Her readings of these spaces inform the decision to forge a new path,
and look for work elsewhere.
Economic and social change as narrated by parents and grandparents.
As part of the first formal interview I conducted with students I made it a point to
ask each person about her or his family, how long they had lived in Factory Town, and

	
  

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what his or her parents did for a living. When students reported that their parents had
lived in Factory Town their whole lives or “since they were little” I would ask them if they
ever talked about how the city has changed since then. For example, Nikia’s father
actively discussed social and economic change with Nikia and her siblings, asking her
to take note of the abandoned homes in the area and the fact that this was a significant
moment in history. Prompted by the camera project associated with this study, Lana’s
father drove her to Delphi and urged her to take pictures of the empty lot that remains
where it once stood. He also shared personal memories of working at Delphi and
recounted the family members who worked there. Still others, like Marcus and Sierra,
had grandparents who passed along narratives of the past, some nostalgic and others
cautionary. Yet, each of these family members played an active role in the process of
place-making. Their stories partially shape their children or grandchildren’s notions of
the past and the changes they had witnessed in the city.
In other cases, young people were left out of the conversation entirely, or chose
to stay out of the conversation. In Sierra’s case, though her grandparents actively
discussed the history of Factory Town with her, her parents were intentionally silent on
the issue. “When it came up,” Sierra explained, “they just said they weren’t going to talk
about it and they are the kind of parents that expect you to listen, don’t ask why, you
just listen. So, its like ‘OK, Mom.” In a later interview she explained that even if people
did talk about the GM plant closings, they did not share the whole story.
…pretty much (they say) our jobs are gone. I think the only person I actually
heard that’s not a teacher here talk about our jobs being outsourced is my

	
  

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granny. She’s the only one who said anything about the outsourcing. Everybody
else is just talking about how GM is not in Factory Town anymore.
The parents of many students were in their late 30s or early 40s. Thus, they had
experienced the trauma of the economic collapse of Factory Town first hand. They were
members of the generation described in the de-industrialization and social class
literature that was emerging in the late 1980s through the early 2000s (Weis1990, 2004;
McCarthy & Apple 1988). This generation had planned for jobs in the “shops,” but many
were rudely awakened when a job in the factories was no longer an option at the end of
their high school careers. Boym (2001) argues that these moments of sudden social
change can be traumatic enough that they are silenced in the discourse, and become
part of the null curriculum (Eisner, 1994) of socialization in such communities. Though
my data do not allow me to make definitive claims that this was in fact the reason for
such silences, I am inclined to relate this concept to the experiences of the participants.
The silence around social change in Factory Town could also be produced by a
number of other factors. First, the topic is somewhat controversial in the sense that
there are many people in Factory Town, like Sierra’s Grandmother, who place blame on
the unions for the economic collapse of the city. There is a second group, represented
here by Sierra, who place blame on GM. The polarization between the two is a point of
contention in Factory Town, and is typically avoided in polite conversation. Secondly,
the outsourcing of labor and the subsequent plant closings that resulted from this
process were traumatic moments, leading to a mass exodus from the city and shrinking
the population to just under 50% of its previous high. In this respect, Factory Town’s
story is a tale of dramatic decline. Cope and Latcham (2012) explain, “the narrative of

	
  

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the city” is the “city’s own story; that is, the social, economic, and political stories that
are created and maintained, both locally and nationally, about its history and
geography” (p. 151). Since Factory Town’s “narrative” emphasizes economic and social
decline, it is often silenced or met with resistance by residents who have retained their
deep attachment to the city. For these reasons, the silences around the
deindustrialization of Factory Town maintain a null curriculum for young people, a
curriculum of which most people are vaguely aware based on their own experiences in
and amongst the spaces of the city, yet is rarely discussed in a direct way with loved
ones and family members at home. One of the only ways students engage with these
issues is through their readings of the spaces that have come symbolize the past:
abandoned houses, closed factories, and empty storefronts. However, there is one
other avenue for students’ engagement with the social and economic changes the city
has undergone in the recent past. My observations of the Social Studies classrooms at
Workman High School indicate that these aspects of Factory Town’s story take shape
as part of a place-based civics curriculum designed in part to instill civic pride in, and
knowledge of the city of Factory Town. In the following section, I explore the educational
space produced during a two-hour bus tour field trip organized as part of the ASHP
curriculum.
Educational Places: The Factory Town Bus Tour Field Trip
Thus far, this chapter has focused on individual students’ perceptions of place
and its pedagogical power in shaping students’ sense of who they are, where they are,
and their possibilities for the future. In the following section, I consider educational
spaces, particularly those produced as part of a Social Studies field trip to various

	
  

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historical sites in Factory Town. The field trip produced a unique learning environment,
in which place-making occurs as part of an institutional curriculum, and where two
trusted teachers inform students about the spaces of their city. Implications of this
complex place-making process are considered.
Though teachers never directly stated “place-consciousness” was a central aim
of the ASHP curriculum, notions of “place” were central to aspects of the daily activities
of the classroom. The central curricular objective of their course, according to Mr.
Carpenter and Mrs. Miller, was for students to gain knowledge, skills and dispositions to
think and act critically in order to be informed citizens. This, according to Mr. Carpenter,
required an American History curriculum that emphasized the contributions of “working
men and women, everyday people” to the larger narrative of American History. It also
required teaching “history, not American History” implying that all history exists in
context and American history cannot be understood outside of a global context, and
without being connected to students lived experiences, which often meant making
connections between national and global events and their local impact. They hoped that
this approach would instill in their students a sense of civic pride in Factory Town, and a
passion to improve their own lives and the fortunes of their community.
The two teachers intended to present a social history of the United States that
was locally relevant and globally contextualized, and therefore meaningful to their
students. This was evidenced by assignments such as the “enlightened cities project,”
and a two-hour bus tour of places of historical and global relevance in Factory Town.
The enlightened cities project was a capstone group project in which students would
produce a city revitalization plan for Factory Town. These plans were to make use of a

	
  

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document that listed social, spatial, and cultural aspects of 10 American cities that had
been deemed “enlightened” by a travel organization. Typically scheduled in September,
the Factory Town bus tour field trip is completed in conjunction with a unit on local
history. Prior to this unit, students spend about 4 weeks studying power and oppression
from a social justice perspective, preparing them for an intensive exploration of spaces
in the city of Factory Town that have been deemed historically significant.
Taking the tour.
The following description of the field trip activity has been distilled from 28 typed
pages of field notes taken during and after the tour. These notes were taken six months
after my initial entry into WHS. My date of entry in February meant I had missed the
Factory Town tour for the cohort of students I had come to know during those months.
However, the teachers contacted me to invite me back to Factory Town for the
opportunity to travel with the students on this field trip. As a result of this timing, I had
the unique opportunity to see the curriculum unfold in the classroom prior to taking the
tour myself. During my classroom observations in the Spring of 2011 students, as well
as teachers, regularly referenced the tour, which consisted of various stops at historical
sites, statues, plaques, buildings and memorials all of which had local significance to
Factory Town history.
What follows is my own narration of a part of the tour as it was recorded in my
th

field notes on September 28 , 2011. Prior to the stop described below, the tour had
included drive-by narrations of, and some actual visits to several historical places,
almost all of which had connections to General Motors Corporation: an historic car
dealership, the estate of former GM C.E.O., C.S. Mott; A Fischer Body plant, which was

	
  

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the site of the first workers movement that would eventually become the “Factory Town
Sit-Down Strike” in 1936 and 1937. Soon after this stop, the tour arrived at the memorial
for this Strike, just two miles from the Fischer Body site.
After several stops relating to the complicated and controversial history of
General Motors Corporation, and those who built it into a global economic
powerhouse, the bus stopped at the Factory Town Sit-Down Strikers Memorial,
on the Southwest side, nestled between an innocuous looking apartment
complex, a residential neighborhood and the one remaining GM plant, is the
United Auto Workers local Regional headquarters. From either street that
borders this building a motorist would not see the memorial. The memorial
honors the men and women who, in 1937, occupied the Fisher Body Plant, along
with 9 other factories in the cold winter months of December, January and
February. These men and women fought off violent attacks from GM hired
enforcers and police in order to fight for good wages and decent working
conditions. This act, perhaps more than any other, set the stage for the
construction of the middle class in the United States. The memorial features
sculptures of men and women in the act of striking, but the central feature is a
large, spinning marble globe, upon which are the words, “common men and
women can change the world.” When one lays their hand on the globe the world
tilts on its axis and high-pressure water below it polishes the marble as it shifts,
leaving one with the powerful impression of possibility through struggle. This
memorial, however, is the definition of “tucked away,” in a neighborhood far from

	
  

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the view of most Factory Towners excepting some Assembly line workers still
employed across the street.
As the bus made its way down a busy Southside thoroughfare we passed
by countless neighborhoods of small, closely packed homes designed and built
for assembly line workers in 1930s and 40s. The windshield of the bus framed
the massive walls of the GM plant that was taking shape at the end of the road.
As we approached the GM plant the bus made a quick right and we parked near
the memorial. As students prepared to exit the bus, Mr. Carpenter explained that
the memorial was erected for those who had fought for workers rights by
occupying the Fisher body plants and Chevrolet plants in Factory Town until they
had the right to form a union. These weeks-long protests led to the formation of
the United Autoworkers and the move toward the development of the American
middle-class. After students had explored the memorial, Mr. Carpenter
continued,
The Globe in the middle represents the global reach of GM and the
automobile. To the left, you will see the Factory Town Truck Assembly.
Do you know anyone or do your families have a three-quarter or one ton
pick up truck, a duelly? Well, if you do it was made RIGHT HERE! In fact,
all of the three-quarter and 1 ton pick up trucks in the fleet are made right
here in Factory Town. A lot of you think GM is not in Factory Town
anymore. Well, guess what, you’re wrong! Ever heard of the Volt, the
Chevy Cruise? Their engines are made in a plant right behind this building
right here.”

	
  

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For nearly ten minutes students walked around the memorial gardens, inscribed
with the names of donors, significant men and women in the United Auto
Workers Union, past Union and GM presidents, and bronze likenesses of the
strikers at work. For many, this appeared to be an opportunity to socialize, but
sporadically the students would stop, read a plaque, or ask a question of one of
their teachers about the memorial, or the strike, or some other element of the
history between GM and General Motors. Several students shared that their
grandparents had been union members, or GM line workers. At these times
when students briefly engaged with the memorial, they seemed intrigued by it.
They respected the space as an important location, one that was significant to
their community. They walked slowly, and took it all in. They pushed the globe at
the center around, laughing and chatting, but remaining respectful of the space at
all times.
After the students had seen most of the memorial, I commented to Amy
that I really appreciated the globe at the center of the memorial. She then told me
a story about her mother, explaining, as she directed my attention to the Factory
Town Truck and Bus Assembly across the street, “she was on the front lines with
the UAW to fight for women’s rights. Those shops weren’t exactly great places to
work for women at the time, and she was one of those common people that
they’re (the creators of the memorial) are talking about.” By that time a crowd of
students had gathered, and they listened relatively appreciatively to her story.
The rest of the tour passed by multiple other sites associated with the
history of the automobile industry in Factory Town, including the brownfields left

	
  

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5

behind when GM closed Chevy in the hole and Buick City . The juxtaposition of
the enthusiasm Dan expressed when describing the Sit-Down Strikers and the
Assembly plant, with his somber tone as the bus rolled slowly though these postapocalyptic brownfields was evident, and easily understandable. Like the rest of
the curriculum, the key aim of this tour was to inspire a sense of pride in the local
community, and to connect the local and global elements of the city through
historical narratives. However, the tour was also a (re)narration of nostalgia, for a
time when Factory Town was the center of the global automotive trade, and an
economic battle ground between the struggle for workers’ rights and the power of
corporations.
It is important to note that the curriculum associated with the field trip did not end when
the bus returned to Workman High School. In fact, the field trip marked the beginning of
a yearlong exploration of American history, which was based, at least partially, on the
experiences and narratives of working class men and women, and contextualized in
relationship to Factory Town’s local history. Immediately following the field trip students
chose an historical figure, place, or event that was highlighted during the tour. They
continued to research it independently, and then they presented their work to the rest of
	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
5
The term “Chevy in the Hole” refers to a massive brownfield on the west side of the
city that once housed the original Chevrolet Motor Company. The plant opened in 1913
and was slowly demolished throughout the 1990s until 2004. The site is commonly
known in Factory Town as “Chevy in the Hole” due to its location in a ravine along the
Factory Town river.
The term “Buick City” also refers to a massive brownfield, the largest in the United
States, which is situated on the north side of the city. This plant was, at one time, the
largest manufacturing complex in the world. Demolition of the site began in 1999, and
was continuing at the time I wrote this in 2012.

	
  

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the class. The curricular intent of the teachers was to lay a foundation of historical
knowledge about the city of Factory Town for students. They hoped this knowledge
would help to contextualize American History content for students and build meaningful
geographic and temporal connections to their daily lives. According to conversations I
had with students about this process, these goals were met. That being said, an
analysis of the trip is necessary to understanding the pedagogical implications of
blurring the boundaries between personal and institutional place-making.
The Explicit, Null and Societal Curricula of the Field Trip.
The curricular space produced by the tour is rife with opportunities for exploring
the implications for students, but I have limited my analysis in order to avoid straying too
far from the aims of this chapter. Making use of three commonly used educational
concepts, the explicit or “taught” curriculum (Cuban, 1991), the null curriculum (Eisner,
1993), and the societal curriculum, I explore the pedagogical power of the field trip as a
place-making process. As a curricular space the field trip is intended to guide students’
attention to specific places and organize their thinking about their city. As such, the filed
trip space differs considerably from the industrial ruins and the neighborhoods students
experience outside of school.
Though the previous section provides some detail of the explicit curriculum of the
field trip, I will briefly expand upon it here. The term “explicit curriculum” is widely used
in the field of curriculum theory; it is used to define the overt organizing of content that is
to be taught in a pedagogical context. Taking place primarily on a school bus, the tour
was organized as a largely didactic process. Mr. Carpenter stood at the front of the bus
and drew attention to sites of historical and social significance as the bus rolled up and

	
  

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down city streets. For the most part, students seemed to be listening and otherwise
attentive. Students were also given an itinerary packed with detailed information,
sometimes more than a page in length about each historical site on the tour. Though 22
sites were mentioned, the bus stopped at three locations: the site of the Factory Town
Sit-down Strikes, a memorial to the Sit-Down Strikers, and a historical district which
houses the home of the city’s first resident and founder. This final stop also included the
headquarters of a carriage company, which eventually became General Motors
Corporation. About two thirds (14) of the 22 sites on the itinerary were associated with
the city’s automotive history. As a result, the tour emphasized Factory Town’s economic
history, drew attention to economic activity and expansion (auto production, auto sales),
and deemphasized the daily lives of individuals with the obvious exception of the
Factory Town-Sit Down Strikes.
Unlike the “in-between-ness” apparent in some students’ reflections on the
industrial and neighborhood sites described above, the field trip offered a linear and
chronologically ordered narrative of Factory Town’s history. Certain aspects of the tour
were intended to offer depictions of the past: memorials to captains of industry, leaders
of organized labor, and the homes of the cities earliest residents. Other sites, like the
former industrial complexes, the farmers market, and the downtown revitalization
projects were intended to describe present aspects of the city. Students’ responded
positively to this order of space and time, and directing of attention to important aspects
of their community. For example, Elizabeth described returning home from the tour and
chiding her mother about never taking her to see the Sit-Down Striker’s memorial,
calling her a “bad mother.” Five other students described how much they appreciated

	
  

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the teachers’ willingness to “teach stuff that other schools don’t teach.” In her
description of the Sit-Down Strike Memorial, Elizabeth explains why this place is
meaningful to her and why a course like ASHP is so important to her.
…it shows even women who were going and fighting on the front line because
they were making themselves look like men. And without them, we wouldn’t’ve
won the war. And those are things that in a regular history class, they wouldn’t
even wanta teach you that. Because they think there’s no reason for you to know
it… and I like that about [Mr. Carpenter’s and Mrs. Miller’s class]... I think it’s to
not only make us be able to use it in a productive way but for us to change the
way things are. And the way that history is already done. And I think that the
more of us that know, the more we can change. And that’s what we need. We
need a change.
Elizabeth’s words toward the end of this statement indicate that the organization offered
by the tour, at least partially, helped Elizabeth develop a sense of civic efficacy, and
pride in her community. Elizabeth went on to explain, “everything [the teachers] talk
about, you can go out and find and touch. So it makes it feel more like it matters than
when they tell you about stuff that is so far away.” In fact, when I asked Elizabeth to
take part in the camera project she returned to the memorial and described it as a
source of great civic pride for two reasons.

	
  

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Figure 3
Elizabeth’s Photograph of the Factory Town Sit-Down Strikers Memorial

	
  

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Figure 4
Elizabeth’s Photograph of the Women’s Brigade

First, Elizabeth describes The Factory Town Sit-Downer’s Memorial as the one
place in Factory Town that had not been damaged by vandals. She is not completely
inaccurate in that claim. Of all the places in the whole of Factory Town the memorial
remains untouched by vandals of any sort. Unlike virtually every other spot in the city,
there is no history of damage to the property. Secondly, Elizabeth takes pride in the
efforts of the Sit-down Strikers, and believes this event is globally significant in leading
to fair wages and labor rights. To Elizabeth, this site mattered more than any space in
Factory Town. To her, the memorial was a source of pride for the rest of the city and a
generator of hope and possibility for a better future.
As part of the school curriculum the field trip was successful in developing a
sense of civic pride, and linking the temporal distance between students and historical
	
  

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events. On numerous occasions students described how they had never known about
some of the stops on the tour. Or, they described having seen them, but not having
knowledge of their importance. Thus, for many students the tour responded to the
silences surrounding the economic decline they had read in the ruins of the city, or
heard fragmented accounts of in conversations with family members. However, it was
limited in its ability to address the powerful affective responses students felt when
describing their neighborhoods, and their thoughts upon passing the brownfields that
are so prominent in the landscape of the city. These aspects of the null curriculum were
central themes that emerged in my conversations with students. Yet, they remained
relatively silent in the discourse I observed in the classroom throughout the semester I
observed as well. Thus, they remained part of the null curriculum in the educational
places produced by the field trip and the classroom.
Nostalgia and Longing in Postindustrial Place-making
This chapter has explored the process of place-making (Fettes and Judson,
2011) for high school students living and learning a postindustrial community. The
dramatic landscapes of the postindustrial city are pedagogical for students, teaching
them about who they are, where they are from, and the possibilities they have in the
future. Students’ readings of these spaces produce powerful sentiments such as
nostalgia, and what Willinger (2007) defines as “longing.” Nostalgia tends to fix
temporality, drawing an individual’s focus to an imagined past, and away from the
possibilities of a future. Though many students read the spaces of the postindustrial
city with the lens of nostalgia, others--like Elizabeth and Nikia—saw a past, present and
future in the spaces of the city. This radical “in-between-ness” of temporality allowed

	
  

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these students to challenge the dominate narratives of decline (Cope and Latcham,
2012) that define the city in social discourse and mass media across the United States.
To these students, the possibilities of the past were not so (distant) memories, while
nostalgic readings of space led students to distance themselves from possibility.
As this chapter illustrates, place is pedagogical. Furthermore, it can also be
curricular, as was illustrated by the analysis of the bus tour field trip. As an educational
space, the field trip effectively ordered students’ experiences of places in the city, fixed
them in a succinct chronology, and organized them as socially significant. Students
responded positively to this process and gained a specific knowledge of local history as
a result of the field trip. However, in fixing temporality the trip provided little space for
students to explore the sentiments they described in their readings of industrial and
residential places. While not a critique of the trip, this does raise generative questions
for place-conscious educators.
The teachers faced the curricular challenge of teaching a curriculum that was
informative of the economic trajectory of their community, but simultaneously provided
space for the possibility of social change. These were the stated aims of the course,
and in some ways these aims were met. However, what are the possibilities of teaching
history with the same eye toward “longing” that Willinger takes to her reading of works
of art?
How would the acknowledgement of “longing” contribute to promoting an “ethic of
care” which is important to so many place-based educators (Noddings, 2005;
Gruenwald, 2003 Sobel, 2010) among others. The un-aestheticized places of
postindustrial landscapes reveal the ongoing tension between continuity and change.

	
  

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Students’ ability to read these spaces creatively holds the potential for innovative
approaches to social change in communities seeking solutions for so many challenges.
Preview of Next Chapter
This Chapter described pedagogical process of place-making for students in
Factory Town. This process informed students’ sense of who they are, where they are
from, and their sense of possibility of the future. The next chapter continues this inquiry,
considering the pedagogical power of place in reinforcing borders between “here and
there,” and “us and them.”

	
  

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CHAPTER FOUR
MAINTAINING BORDERS AND BOUNDARIES: CONTESTED GEORGRAPHIES OF
SELF AND OTHER
“’Where is here’ is less perplexing than ‘Who am I?’ …more perplexing yet, is the
question, ‘What am I that I am here?’ -- Willinsky,1998 p. )
The city of Factory Town, like most American cities, is a community made up of
sharp divisions and fragmentation related to issues of race and social class. A long
history of racial and class division has resulted in the formation of clear boundaries
around who belongs where and who does not. This fragmentation is informative to
students, as they develop an understanding of who they are in connection to their
neighbors, their community, and the world beyond the boundaries of the city. In this
chapter, I explore the city’s racial and class divisions as they are experienced by
students through the social production of space, or what has been referred to
throughout this dissertation as place-making.
Factory Town’s economic history has simultaneously sharpened its internal and
external boundaries. Depending upon whom you talk to globalization has either brought
Factory Town together, or it has continued to divide the city. Globalization, rather than
rolling over everything, works through particularities (Hall, 1991); it influences local
spaces--social, physical, and otherwise--to produce nuanced responses to its
processes. Factory Town’s “dependent deindustrialization,” a term used to describe the
removal of a corporate center from a community that depends upon it for the generation

	
  

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of capital, has had profound effects on the narrative construction of identity in the city
(Dadaneau, 1992). After the plant closings of the late 1980s and early 1990s, young
people had little opportunity to follow in their parents’ footsteps, and obtain work in the
factories. The young people who remained in Factory Town after the economic collapse
are now the parents of the students who took part in this study. The economic fallout of
the plant closings has resulted in apathy among many in Factory Town and a renewed
drive to revitalize the community in others.
The absence of an economic base has had well-documented material effects; It
has had significant demographic implications as well. According to U.S. Census data,
1.46% of the population of Factory Town was foreign-born in 2003, and that number has
continued to decrease over the past decade. The lack of “pull factors” has limited
Factory Town’s attraction for incoming residents. For example, in 2000, Factory Town’s
Hispanic population made up 3% of the population. Today this group makes up 3.7%.
While this number appears to show significant growth, the overall population of the city
has dropped by roughly 23,000 mostly black and white residents during the same
period. Therefore, actual growth among the Hispanic population is estimated to have
only increased by roughly 450 people (U.S. Census data, 2010). National numbers
indicate that the population of Hispanic residents surged by 43% between 2000, and
2010. This is just one indicator that Factory Town is a shrinking city, and as I will show
in this chapter, the effects of these changes shape the way Factory Towners think about
themselves and their community.
Casey (1993) specifies the power of place, “to direct and stabilize us, to
memorialize and identify us, to tell us who and what we are in terms of where we are

	
  

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(as well as where we are not)” (emphasis and parentheses in the original, p. xv). In
order to better understand the process of place-making in Factory Town, this chapter
explores students’ and teachers’ perceptions and experiences of the external
boundaries of the city. Furthermore, I share students’ and teachers’ narratives of “being
from Factory Town,” a distinction that was highly meaningful in various ways for various
participants. I also explore participants’ experiences of the internal boundaries,
produced along race and class lines, in the city. I argue that discursive practices such
as narratives of othering, and spatial practices of othering, such as policing racial
boundaries, reinforce students’ perceived isolation from places outside their city, in their
region, and beyond.
The Theoretical Space of the Chapter
Barbara Hooper argues, in “Bodies, cities, texts, the case of “Citizen Rodney
King” that:
In times of social crisis – when centers and peripheries will not hold – collective
and individual anxiety rise and the politics of difference become especially
significant. The instability of the borders heightens when either their
transgression or maintenance is magnified. When borders are crossed,
disturbed, contested and so become a threat to order, hegemonic power acts to
reinforce them: the boundaries and territory, nation, ethnicity, race, gender, sex,
class, erotic practice, are trotted out and vigorously disciplined. At the same time,
counter-hegemons are working to harness the disorder… for political use. In
these periods, bodies, cities and texts become key sites for hegemonic and
counter-hegemonic contestations… in the late twentieth century, it is/ [was] the

	
  

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global megacity with its restless populations, and the sensationalized demonized
bodies of black males and urban gangs who have taken on the role of
representing social disorder and pathology (Hooper 1990, p. 80).
While Hooper was writing about the Los Angeles riots, her words remain relevant to the
current project as well. Though Factory Town is by no means a “megacity,” it, and
particularly its African-American citizens, are constructed in the regional and national
media as representative of the same fears of “social disorder and pathology” Hooper
describes above. Factory Town is a city set apart, a space that is a “no go” for many
people who hail from its relatively prosperous suburbs as well as those surrounding
nearby Detroit. As has been suggested in previous chapters, Factory Town is
narrativized in the media as an “urban wasteland,” and shamed in lists of the countries
“worst” places. All of this naming, narrowing, and marginalizing maintain the narrative
and shape spatial and discursive practices that reify fears of the “other.” In similar
fashion, internal boundaries between “black and white” and “us and them” continue to
divide the city along racial and class lines.
Illustrative of this point is a 2001 event that led to sensationalized media
coverage about Black on White violence in the city of Factory Town. Though it
happened a decade ago, the story is still very relevant to Factory Town’s residents.
Several adults I came to know through the course of this study, and two students who
participated in the work, referred to this story as they spoke about the neighborhood
where this story took place. Three white teenagers from a nearby suburb hopped a train
heading off in search of adventure. When their train failed to stop at a small town
outside of Factory Town, they ended up in a high-poverty, high-crime neighborhood in

	
  

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the heart of the city. They wandered around until night fell, and spent some time
stargazing on the roof of an abandoned school. Later, when they went in search of a
phone to call a parent to pick them up, they were reportedly attacked by a group of
African-American young men and teenagers. The details of the events leading up to the
attack, and exactly what provoked it remain unclear to this day. During the attack one of
the white teenagers was murdered, a young White woman was sexually assaulted, and
the third member of the group was beaten severely. What resulted was a media frenzy,
which characterized Factory Town as a wasteland, populated only by dangerous and
violent “demonized” African-American young people. For suburban dwellers living near
the city, and for some who live within its, borders stories like this one solidify Factory
Town’s place on the fringes of normalcy. For those who read them, media accounts of
this isolated, but tragic, event narrate Factory Town as a space set apart, an urban
wilderness unlike the surrounding rural and suburban communities. Factory Town is
juxtaposed against the “safe,” “upscale” or “normal” spaces of suburban life. These
spaces are primarily White spaces, areas where African-Americans are outsiders,
unwelcomed, and marginalized. Thus, it is the inscription of race on the body, to borrow
terminology from feminist-postmodern philosophy, that allows for the identification of
boundaries and their disruption in the social space of the city. When borders are
crossed, “hegemonic power acts to reinforce them” (Hooper, 80). In the following
section, I explore students’ and teachers perceptions of the borders “around” the city
and their implications for how participants come to see their position in the world.
Factory Town as (An)other Space: Constructing and Contesting the Borders
Around the City

	
  

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For the students and teachers who participated in this study, media stories and
local/regional narratives of Factory Town maintained their status as “others” in the eyes
of outsiders. During my time working in Factory Town, a young woman from a nearby
suburb overdosed on heroin. A string of such overdoses prompted local officials and
community organizations in the town to place blame on drug traffic coming from Factory
Town, rather than address issues within their own community that may have also
contributed to the problem. Reshaunda, who is African-American, and many of her
peers (Black or White) were angry about such a proposition stating,
…even places that you think are all… suburban can be… just as bad. They’re
just low key. …you don’t see them on the news cuz somebody got shot or
something. Yeah …what’s that girl died because of drugs or something and they
didn’t think it was her cuz she lived in a, you know, a suburb… they blamed the
drug dealers, not her for taking the drugs. Cuz you know, oh, that black guy gave
her drugs so they’re gonna get him. You know?
This story put Reshaunda in a position to defend her community. Apparent in
Reshaunda’s words are ideas about boundaries. She differentiates between which
communities get media coverage for their tragedies, and which communities enjoy
relative anonymity in the face of tragedy. She then makes reference to “you know, a
suburb” using a euphemism for a White, middle class neighborhood. In the final line,
Reshaunda identifies the drug dealer, a young man from factory town, as a “black guy”
and asserts that the media coverage, and the suburban community’s response to the
tragedy are a witch hunt, distracting them from their own problems and placing them on
Factory Town. Reshaunda talks about the racial implications in this story

	
  

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interchangeably with the spatial implications of this story. It is much about space, as it
is about race for Reshaunda. Furthermore, the prevalence of media discourses that use
space to reify racial tensions indicates the Suburban spokesperson, and the media crew
who shot the story drew the same parallels that Reshaunda drew.
Stories like this one are prevalent in the Factory Town media, but they are not
an exclusively local phenomenon. They are reproduced around the world, and are
rooted in anxieties about “the other.” In this case, however, they also contribute to a
local narrative of Factory Town as an “other” space, the center of anxiety for outsiders,
but home to the citizens of the community. Nearly every participant in this study
referenced a common interaction they had with outsiders. When outside the physical
borders of the city, and making an introduction, they were regularly met with responses
like these: “So, you’re from Factory Town! I thought you’d be like a thugged-out gangsta
or something.” “You’re from Factory Town! Oh, I’m sorry!” “Factory Town, Yikes!”
These, and countless other responses like them were shared with me by all but two
participants as they described their interactions with outsiders. Though these stories
were shared in formal interviews it was more common for them to come up in regular
conversation about their city.
Factory Town is a town with a bad reputation. It is a place on the “worst” cities
lists of various magazines and websites for its legacy of joblessness and violence.
According to both adult and adolescent participants, these designations immediately set
them apart, and construct them as “Other” in the eyes of an outsider. This was
frustrating for most participants and they challenged such designations in some of the
same ways as Reshaunda. They did not deny the problems Factory Town had, but they

	
  

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also argued that every community had problems of its own. To many participants,
Factory Town was made to “look bad” to make “a good news story,” “or to sell a
magazine.” However, the same students also regularly referred to the problems of their
community in realistic terms, recognizing that it was unique in the severity of some of
the challenges--economic and otherwise--facing the community.
Students’ and teachers’ interactions with me at the outset of the study speak to
the power of these narratives in shaping their identity in relationship to their community
as well. Students immediately assumed, once they became aware of my outsider
status, that they would have to challenge these stereotypes, that I had come looking for
a reproduction of all of them. Overcoming the barriers this created was not easy, but I
worked diligently to be recognized as a thoughtful and attentive outsider, open to
understanding Factory Town from perspectives that go beyond national media attention.
Data gleaned from interviews conducted early in the study indicate a sense of hesitancy
and distrust among many participants. This changes with most participants as the dates
of the interviews progress in the catalog. These changes are evident in the conversation
I shared with Ahmed, which is recounted in the latter part of this chapter. The adults I
spoke with were equally cautious, and they also felt compelled to challenge stereotypes
upon meeting me. As a Factory Town native, Amy Miller describes regularly having to
defend her decision to stay in Factory Town to old friends who have left the city. She
described a recent reunion with her college roommate on Facebook. It had been twentyfive years since the two had last spoken. Amy, playing the part of her roommate, tells it
like this.

	
  

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“I thought you always said you were gonna get outta Factory Town! I thought
you wanted to move on to bigger and better things.”
Amy’s response was, “Well, ya know, I just thought, ‘I’m here to do a job!’ I’m in
Factory Town and I’m doing something. I didn’t just walk away pretending I was
somehow better than this place since I got an education. I was just disappointed
that that was her attitude, I guess. I mean, my family is here and this place
means something to me, it always will be a part of me I guess.”
For her roommate Factory Town is a place to transcend, to move past. For Amy, home
and identity are inseparable. She explains that Factory Town is “a part” of her; it has
deep meaning that cannot be denied. Her friend’s insult was not only an attack on her,
but also an attack on her community, which was equally hurtful to Amy. Amy is in a
partnership with her community. She describes in great detail how her experience in the
Factory Town schools from K-16 worked for her, and her passions were recognized and
supported by “the system.” Amy defines the “system” as the systems of social welfare,
education, and healthcare made available to her as a young person. She feels deeply
connected to Factory Town, and that the city is “a place worth fighting for.” However,
she recognizes her affiliation with the community immediately places her as an “other,”
one who was not able to get out, in the eyes of those who have left. Amy defines herself
against her friend, as one who did not abandon her community in a time of need,
something that Amy found “disappointing” about her friend’s position on this issue.
For the adolescents in the study, their affiliation with the city was also a powerful
identifier of who they were in comparison to others. Jimmy, a white student, explained
that when he went to visit his father in Tennessee the people he met were shocked to

	
  

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meet him. They expected “a thugged-out gansta wannabe or something.” “Thug,” a
racially charged euphemism for violent teenage male, is often used in association with
African Americans. “Gangsta” is its close equivalent. In such moments, Factory
Towners come face to face with the perception of their city as a place set apart, left
behind, or abandoned. In instances like the one Jimmy described, Factory Town was
marginalized based on the perception that it is an “African American” space. Nikia, an
African-American student, described talking to relatives in Mississippi and explaining
she is from Factory Town. She described the typical response as “Oh, Factory Town!
Why you still live in Factory Town?” She described their reactions as “heaven and hell”
reactions, if you are from Factory Town, “it must be like living in Hell, or at least a place
you really don’t wanna be!”
This sense of “otherness” was typically described as “frustrating,” or
“disappointing” to the participants who experienced these encounters. However, when
narrating to a Factory Town audience, students and adults used their civic identities as
Factory Towners to their benefit. Mr. Carpenter, and Mrs. Miller regularly employed their
Factory Towner status to appeal to the sensibilities of their students and gain their trust
and respect. Students, such as Lana, described how she wished she still lived in
Factory Town as a way to identify herself as belonging “in the hood,” where
communities were close and people looked out for one anther. Though she still lives in
Factory Town, Lana explains that her middle class neighborhood doesn’t feel like it is
part of Factory Town.
I live in a nice neighborhood now. [My current neighborhood] is nice but you
know, I rather would live in the ‘hood,’ not for like hood reasons or anything.

	
  

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Because like on my street, I guess because it’s a busy street but we don’t like
communicate with our neighbors. We might see them outside and wave but
there’s no, there’s no kids around here or nothing but I used to live on Euclid off
of Welch and I was younger though. I was, I moved over here when I was eight
and it was, it was nice on my block. Right behind my block was like crazy but on
my block, every, it was like I could go outside and play with all the kids and
expect nothing to happen and like they, everybody on the block looked out for
each other.
For Lana, though the reputation of Factory Town was tied to crime and other urban
“problems,” she felt she belonged as a member of the community. For Lana, Factory
Town represented a sense of belonging and comfort. In her new neighborhood she did
not feel the same sense of belonging she had when she lived in “the hood.” Marcus,
another African American participant recounted happy memories of living in the
projects, siting a sense of closeness, togetherness, and friendship that he has not felt
since moving into a working-class subdivision. He (re)narrated “the projects” as spaces
of togetherness and solidarity, in opposition to the “everyone for themselves” narrative
produced by media stories such as the one described in the early pages of this chapter.
Regardless of how students identified with the city, they recognized that others viewed
Factory Town as a space to avoid.
The idea that Factory Town is, in fact, isolated from the rest of world is false. The
narrative construction of Factory Town as a “no-go” space, however, allows outsiders to
deflect the problems within their own communities by placing them in Factory Town.
Despite its well-documented social and economic problems, the city is full of rich

	
  

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history, culture, and community engagement. In other words, the mainstream narratives
of Factory Town described above are only one aspect of reality. In fact, these imagined
visions of Factory Town make imagined visions of the “non-Factory Town” possible.
Maintenance of these narratives allows those outside the city to retain a simple vision of
an increasingly complicated world, in which dichotomies such as inside/outside are
increasingly blurred and long held physical boundaries are contested.
The recognition of a non-Factory Town.
The notion of the “non-Factory Town” did inform students’ perceptions of the city,
however.
DeAndra: Once you leave (Factory Town) it’s like to me, like (the road leading
toward a suburban mall), it’s all highway and then it looks more better as a state,
like it looks fine to me, you know, cuz you don’t see vandalism… and then you
don’t see like the destroyed properties or anything cuz they’re making it look like
something that there’s not. But once you go out to Factory Town or you go to like
the other parts of it, all you see is factories that’s closed down, that’s been there
for quite a while look like, windows busted out of it. You know, vandalized. And
then you see houses that’s not sold or you see homeless people in the corner of
the street, you know…
DeAndra describes spaces outside of Factory Town as “looking better,” or “fine”
because they’re “trying to make it look like something that they’re not.” In other words,
DeAndra recognizes that attempts have been made to beautify the outer ring of the city,
while inside the city the space tells the story of loss, injustice, and economic depression.

	
  

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For DeAndra, more than many other participants, disinvestment in urban spaces
was a sign of social injustice. When she read the suburban space surrounding the mall,
she recognized where capital investment was being funneled. She also strikingly
recounts her daily readings of the areas surrounding her neighborhood in Factory Town.
She draws particular attention to aspects of the community that indicate disinvestment:
vandalism, closed down factories, and the presence of homeless people. DeAndra
verged on tears as she described her frustration with visiting a city park only to see that
the Mayor’s office had stopped maintaining the space explaining, “we can’t bring
nothing her without it gettin’ torn up, vandalized or destroyed, and the city stop taking
care of the park. That’s like when you know they don’t care.” Her reference to “they”
seems to relate back to city and government officials who are responsible for park
maintenance.
DeAndra recognizes distinct boundaries based on capital investment, between
the value placed on her life, and the lives of those who live outside of Factory Town.
She connects this lack of investment on the part of city government back to a lack of
care for the residents. These boundaries may be physical, but they inform a deeper
sense of belonging—as well as “longing”—that informs DeAndra’s sense of how she is
situated in relationship to others. The places near the mall are valued, along with the
people who use them. The places in the city are not valued. The people who inhabit
them, according to DeAndra’s reading, are not valued either. These stark contrast map
out clear boundaries for DeAndra, dividing lines between here and there, as well as us
and them. Her daily routines traversing these boundaries reinforce these divisions
through placemaking. In DeAndra’s case this involves an “active reaching out to grasp

	
  

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an understanding of paces” (Fettes and Judson, 2011), while for most students these
boundaries are maintained through unconscious, daily interactions in and amongst
them.
Reshaunda, who lives part-time with her mother in a wealthy suburb, and parttime with her father in Factory Town, describes the difference in the two neighborhoods
like this:
Mount Ellis, I mean, you see large houses. You don’t see that many abandoned
houses, like you would here, normally. And like over in my dad’s neighborhood, a
lot of the houses are pretty small so whereas like, like the houses are extremely
random. Like there are no houses that look alike. There’s like, on my block,
there’s like one two story and the rest are just one story. It’s like where’d that
house come from, you know? That’s kinda how that neighborhood is, like literally
random like that.
The space of Mount Ellis is defined in terms of size of the homes, and in Factory Town
the space is described as both “random” and “abandoned.” Jamie also lives in Mount
Ellis and describes her neighborhood below:
My neighborhood now… is actually a really nice neighborhood. It’s in Mount Ellis.
I live in an apartment, I live in an apartment right now but my sister lives just
down the street so we visit her a lot and houses are all really nice and it’s a nice
place. People are pretty friendly, kinda snobby but they’re friendly as friendly can
be. So it was nice neighborhood but even before I moved, the neighborhood we
lived in was pretty nice. It wasn’t like you’d expect Factory Town to be. It was a
nice neighborhood. There aren’t like a lot of dilapidated houses. It’s like every,

	
  

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almost all the houses are lived in. They’re well taken care of. All the lawns are
nice. There’s not anybody like that has a bunch of stuff out on their lawn. It’s
just, it’s like a typical suburban… like you would expect if you heard of a
suburban neighborhood, if you went there, that’s exactly what you would expect.
Jamie offers a version of Factory Town that is similar to Reshaunda, emphasizing the
differences in terms of material space. She juxtaposes the “typical Factory Town
neighborhood”, with “the typical suburban neighborhood.”
The picture that emerges from these descriptions places Factory Town on the
outside of “normal, and defines the city in terms of decline, loss, and difference. The
“non-Factory Town” concept informed students’ sense of position in relationship to the
communities around it. Not surprisingly, those inside the city were able to see and
narrate multiple Factory Towns, the Factory Town in decline, as well as the Factory
Town of solidarity and hope.
Nevertheless, outsiders’ misinformed and one dimensional picture of Factory
Town had a distancing effect that positioned the city as an “island-like” place, set apart
and removed from a larger national and international discourse. This distancing of
Factory Town, and the ongoing media coverage of Factory Town as a city that time,
globalization, or GM has forgotten, has been internalized by Factory Towners in ways
that make it difficult for them to comprehend their local community as being part of a
larger global network of communities.
“Factory Town is an Island:” disconnected from the world.
During the course of one interview with Sierra, I chatted about how I saw Factory
Town as a historically important city due to its economic changes and its history of

	
  

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powerful industry and labor organizations. Her response indicated that she could not
fully agree with me. After asking her if she agreed with my assessment she replied:
Like a lot of times, no. I really don’t. I just see us as another city. You know, just
another city. Of people trying to get by. I don’t really even think about it like that.
Like I know we have, or we had GM. Like I know that important figures came to
Factory Town to talk politics. I know all that. It’s just… sometimes it feels as
though Factory Town is like an island sometimes to me. Like nobody, I don’t
know. It just seems like an island. We don’t really have a connection to other
places that’s not in Michigan. It’s like an island. It’s like wow, is anybody gonna
come in? Do we have any tourists? Do we have any festivals? Are we gonna do
something for ourselves? It’s like an island to me cuz…
Aaron: It’s like it’s out here alone
Sierra: Yeah, but I know it’s not. That’s the thing. I know it’s not. I’m aware of
that. Just feels that way. I guess.
Aaron: Where do you think that feeling comes from?
Sierra: …it seems lonely cuz we don’t get a lot of tourists. We don’t have a lot of
things to attract other people to come. I mean, they’re starting to try to make it a
college town but it still doesn’t… it’s not attracting a lot of people. Our city isn’t
growing either. I don’t know. It just… we’re not trying to do a lot for ourselves
either so it’s like well, we’ll always be disconnected from other cities. It’s not like
we’re trying to ask them to like join us in anything. It’s just, we’re just Factory
Town, just a bunch of people trying to get by, that’s how I see it.

	
  

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Sierra uses the absence of visitors and the lack of pull factors for immigrants and
tourists as an explanation for her feeling that Factory Town is set apart from the rest of
the world. She also draws upon the idea that people in the city of Factory Town could
be to blame for failing to connect to larger spheres of influence. She historicizes the
global economic connections that Factory Town once had via GM, but emphasizes that
the company no longer serves as a connection to other parts of the world. Soon after
she describes this lost connection, she explains how no one from the outside travels to
Factory Town as a destination, and places blame on the citizens of Factory Town for the
absence of tourists. She asks the rhetorical questions, “we gonna do anything for
ourselves?,” meaning “we” need to do something to solve this problem, but no one is
working toward this goal. To Sierra, Factory Town depends on these connections and
they have been severed. She sees herself and her community as disconnected from the
world, a place unto itself. In so doing, she emphasizes the role of local citizens in
changing this trend. In other words, responsibility for place-making may have once
been the role of a corporation, but it is now up to Factory Towners to create a space
worth visiting.
Sierra is not alone in this characterization of the community as an island. Ahmed
also constructed boundaries around the city of Factory Town. According to Ahmed,
Factory Town feels “disconnected.”
Actually, now that I’m thinking about it, I feel like Factory Town is, I don’t wanta
say abandoned but not always connected… Right now I feel like it’s not really
connected and Factory Town’s just dead right now. Like things that are going on
in Factory Town don’t necessarily affect things that are going on in Egypt or

	
  

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Australia or anywhere else around the world. Maybe somehow indirectly but
definitely not directly. Everywhere is affected, the entire world, indirectly. But
right now I don’t see how Factory Town is indirectly reacting around the world. So
that, that’s what I mean. It’s like, I don’t see it. I mean, like I know that the
businesses are trying to catch up and there’s a lot of economic problems right
now, but I don’t know, I just don’t think its connected.
Still Ahmed insisted that there had to be some global processes that had an impact on
Factory Town, but he could not put a finger on them. Both Sierra and Ahmed were
trying to come to terms with this sense of disconnection they felt as members of this
community. I believe both of the participants were confronted with an idea they had only
an intuitive sense about, no strong opinion or position on the issue. However, the
intuitive sense was that Factory Town was a dead city, an abandoned city, or an island.
By all accounts, the adolescent participants in this study described Factory Town
as a marginal space, a space distanced from the heart of global economics, politics or
cultural change. However, students’ everyday lived experiences did not always reflect
this distance. Students were actively engaged in online social networks, they enjoyed
aspects of popular culture, some of which were international or global in origin.
Furthermore, many students identified themselves with other communities in Florida,
Mississippi, Germany and other physical locales. Many students had family members
from Southern States, a carryover from the historical migration to Factory Town in
search of work, and the subsequent emigration from Factory Town when opportunities
disappeared. However, family connections were not the only connections. Nikia
reported being connected to young people in Australia and Canada via Facebook, and

	
  

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through her Church youth group. Ahmed’s sense of Factory Town’s disconnection was
striking given his status as a dual citizen, and his deep involvement with one of Factory
Town’s largest immigrant communities. In other words, many students’ lives extended
far beyond the city limits, but when it came to theorizing Factory Town’s connection to
other communities, they immediately fell back on the narratives that set Factory Town
apart from the rest of the world. In short, imagined notions of Factory Town’s
disconnection from other communities, somehow trumped students’ everyday life
experiences of connections beyond the city limits. Thus, the ways others perceived of
them influenced how students and teachers talked about themselves as members of a
local community.
This sense of isolation produced boundaries around the city, sectioning it off from
“normalcy” and marginalizing those who call it home. Even within the city, boundaries
and borders divided the community along racial lines. Factory Towners recognized deep
internal fragmentation within the city itself. The following section of this chapter will
argue that distinct borders within the city were regularly contested and maintained
among participants, similar to the ways in which the imagined boundaries around the
city were contested and maintained.
Internal Boundaries: Building and Blurring Racial Divisions Within the City
Using U.S. Department of Census data, the Population Studies Department at
the University of Michigan completed a study, which measured racial segregation in
every major U.S. city, metropolitan area, and county. Once these data were compiled
the group developed a scale, “the index of dissimilarity,” which identified the level of
segregation in these areas on a scale from 0 to 100, 0 being the impossible equal

	
  

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distribution of two races over geographic areas, and 100 being the equivalent of total
racial apartheid. At the level of the city block, Factory Town’s black and white
populations scored an 89.6 on this scale, 11 notches below “apartheid.” For reasons of
comparison, Birmingham, Alabama was 9 points lower on the index, a slightly less
tragic 20 points below apartheid (Retrieved electronically on April 16th, 2012). Numbers
were similar at the “block” level for segregation between blacks and Hispanics as well
as whites and Hispanics. In other words, Factory Town is highly segregated by race.
While Factory Town has always been divided by racially homogenous
neighborhoods, massive “white flight” in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the influx
of more African Americans sharply intensified the level of segregation in the city. The
expansion and development of many suburbs arose during this time as middle and
working class whites left the city. This created a “doughnut effect” in which the city
center and the outer ring of suburbs were economically prosperous, and a ring of
neighborhoods surrounding the city center fell on economic hard times. White flight led
the City Government and private enterprise to disinvest in these urban neighborhoods.
As the General Motors factories closed, conditions only worsened as many of the
working class Blacks and Whites who moved to the city in search of work began
emigrating from Factory Town.
While numbers tell a compelling story about segregation in Factory Town, they
do not capture the visceral experience of the boundaries that produce a complex microgeography of difference within the city. In this next section I spend a significant amount
of space describing adult participants’ perceptions of the racial fragmentation of the city.
I realize I am privileging the adult perspective in this section. I made the conscious effort

	
  

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to elaborate on these perceptions as they influence the ways these boundaries are
reconstructed within the explicit and hidden curricula of the ASHP classroom, and
support the argument that these divisions have been entrenched for generations.
Teachers’ perceptions of race and class division.
Mr. Carpenter explained that some people in Factory Town feel that these
borders are constructed as the result of a “Factory Town cultural thing,” a term I read as
a situation unique to Factory Town, more so than an easily recognized racial divide.
Factory Town has a way of being extremely segregated even though we are a
northern industrial city. And that segregation is not only encouraged, it is actually
perpetuated by the community in which the segregation exists. So, what happens
is you tend to get theses enclaves, we talked about this early on, about the ethnic
enclaves and racial enclaves that exist, but then there’s this “we’re a community”,
separate from “their” community, separate from “their” community, and it
becomes competitive. So the Mexicans on the Eastside are competing with the
Blacks on the north end, are competing with the Whites on the Westside, are
competing with the Whites on the Southside. And then it turns into a struggle of
place instead of, “we’re one community struggling to survive.”
One of Mrs. Miller’s and Mr. Carpenter’s unwritten but regularly referenced curricular
goals is associated with the promotion of unity among their students. They reference
this aim in this passage after illustrating the deeply held divisions along racial lines that
make up the cultural landscape of Factory Town, producing competition and further
division. As teachers, they challenge these divisions by encouraging students to see
commonality amongst difference through assignments intended to create a cohesion

	
  

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based on social class, and to depict racial lines as “divide and conquer tactics” that are
intended to keep the working class communities (in this case the community of Factory
Town) from gaining any upward momentum.
Both teachers are white and middle class, and tend to use social class, and local
civic pride as aspects of identity around which their students can unite. The racial and
class lines they describe explain the lived experiences of these divisions in the day to
day for many people in Factory Town. Race, most visibly, is a dividing line in the city,
but class divisions are equally palpable for those a generation or more older than the
students. Mrs. Miller, in her early 50s at the time of the study, hails from a working
class background on the Eastside of Factory Town. Her childhood experience in a
family that slipped in and out of poverty has given her a vivid sense of the
intersectionality between race and class. Below, she recounts a conversation she had
with a Factory Town-based professor and her classmates where this division figured
prominently.
I mean, I think, because I come from the East Side, though, and because of my
background as a working-class person, sometimes verging on poverty, I was
always very aware of class. And even on the national level I kept pushing class.
Whenever anybody else was pushing race, I was pushing class. And not to say
that… in fact I remember one conversation we had in college, where at the
table… somebody at the table, one of the profs here said: “What’s more
important, race or class?” Then went around the table, when everybody said
race, and I was the only one that said class. And then there was a Park Ranger
who’s sitting next to me and she said, “I think its class too.” And then I said, “I’m

	
  

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not saying the two don’t go hand-in-hand, they really do…I said, “the very fact
that… one guy said, “I think its race because you can see it.” And I said, “I think
its class because we deny it.” [Laughs]. And I still feel that way. That what’s
going on right now is really class-warfare. And, you know, we use race, we use
orientation, we use all kinds of shit, as a smoke-screen. You know, divide and
conquer. It’s working pretty well. For that 1% it’s working just dandy.
While Mrs. Miller emphasizes that class seems to work to divide members of her
community more than race, she also recognizes that “the two go hand in hand.” She
sites her experience of growing up in Factory Town, specifically the poverty stricken
east side, as a reason for her view. Furthermore, she points out how the conversation
she recounts was initiated by a professor and that her experience differed from the rest
of the group. She identifies her stance as marginal, and she envisions this as a critical
stance placing power at the center of the “class vs. race” debate. Her comments further
illustrate the placed nature of one’s understanding of difference, and the influence
Factory Town’s labor history has on her own experiences of race and class discourses.
For many Factory Towners in my study, at least those from a generation or more prior
to Factory Town’s young people, spatialized notions of class and race played a
significant role in how they positioned themselves in relation to, and in opposition to
others. For these teachers, however, class seemed to be at the heart of the problem.
The fact that Mr. Carpenter and Mrs. Miller spend considerable curricular time on
issues of race and class divisions is an indicator that these identifiers and the
boundaries they produce are meaningful aspects of life for them, and that they
recognize their meaning in students’ lives. One of their curricular aims is to situate the

	
  

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work they ask students to do in relationship to their lived experiences in Factory Town.
These curricular decisions illustrate the importance the adult participants placed on the
problematic class and race divisions they observed in the city.
Students’ perceptions of race and class divisions.
In an attempt to understand the dominant themes of students’ perceptions of
difference, and the ways they identified them”selves” with and against an “other,” I
reviewed student interviews and classroom observations, creating a list of categories
students used to define others, both locally and globally. The list included not
surprisingly, race, class, and gender, but they also discussed differences between those
who contribute positively to their community and those who do not. I then identified
which students used which categories and when they used them. The results of this
process indicate that students’ positioning of self and other were as fragmented as the
city itself. This is due, partially, to the fact that I did not directly ask students to explain
the borders and boundaries around race and class in their city. Rather, these themes
developed organically from the conversations we had, and situations I observed. I also
become more aware of these aspects of students’ experience as I progressed through
the analysis and coding process described above, in Chapter Two.
Nine of the 15 students in this study made regular references to race and class
as they talked about who they were and how they positioned themselves with and
against others they knew. Rarely did students directly address issues of gender, and
even more rarely—in only two instances--did students articulate cultural differences
across international borders. In other words, students rarely articulated their
understanding of the lived experience of people outside their local communities.

	
  

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Through the lenses of this research, when mention was made it was through vague
references rather than detailed conceptions. Yet observations and personal accounts
can help draw connections between what was discussed in interviews and what I
observed in their daily lives inside Workman High School.
Using interview and observation data, I describe the development of two
competing discourses within the school when it came to race, class and gender. The
first can be described as a consistent and identifiable critical discourse around diversity
that was apparent within the ASHP classroom. The second discourse, described more
completely following this section, was a highly contentious racial discourse, which--in
my observation--was less prominent than a discourse on social class in classroom
discussions. It was consistently silent within the school itself. Nevertheless, this silent
discourse served as a powerful narrator of “self” in relation to “other” for students who
participated in this study.
Discourse 1: The explicit discourse of human diversity in ASHP.
There was a consistent and identifiable critical discourse about human diversity
in the ASHP classroom. It was promoted by the teachers as a formal curriculum and, at
least to some degree, accepted by many students who took the class. This discourse
emphasized unity through socio-economic, civic, and geographic similarities among the
students. The teachers openly encouraged students to think about how media and
political discourses surrounding race were a “smokescreen” for what they saw as a
class struggle that was unfolding in America. This concept was constructed in
discussions of current events such as the “Occupy Wall Street Movement” which was
gaining increased momentum at the time, and soon became known in the U.S, as the

	
  

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“Occupy Movement.” It was also apparent in discussions of highly controversial rightwing policies that were being enacted at the state level at the time. These included the
passage of a bill that would allow the state government to appoint an “Emergency
Financial Manager” to replace democratically elected officials in communities that were
unable to balance their fiscal budgets and were facing extreme financial hardship.6
These highly controversial, and wholly undemocratic processes stirred debate across
the state, and around the country. They were also debated in the ASHP classroom as
Mr. Carpenter and Mrs. Miller challenged students to see both race and class as
contributing factors in how decisions were made during this process. Students regularly
approached both teachers after class or during break to discuss these issues.
Mrs. Miller was very active in grassroots politics and encouraged her students to
participate in various forms of action as well. During the time of this study she was
involved with a recall campaign design to remove the controversial right wing governor
from power. Mr. Carpenter, a union representative, regularly shared experiences of
battling the extremely right-wing “austerity” measures that were being taken up by the
State government, consistently referring to the policies as classist. While social class
made up a significant portion of the curriculum, both teachers simultaneously made
significant efforts to include issues of race and gender in the curriculum as well. Both
teachers recognized the intersectionality of these processes, and this filtered into the
	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
6
Roughly six months after data were collected for this study, the state government
appointed an emergency financial manager in the city of Factory Town. An EFM was
also appointed in another form company town, a predominantly Black community in the
region. In a move that shocked the entire country, as I wrote the final sections of this
study, the governor appointed an EFM to balance the budget of another major city in the
area. Debate swirled about the power of racism in deciding which cities where to
receive EFMs.
	
  

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curriculum. However, as the curriculum was enacted in the classroom, the blurring of
the boundaries between race, class, and oppression tended to result in a “unity
narrative.” This is not to be confused with the “colorblindness narrative,” which tends to
minimize racial differences. Rather, the ASHP course constructed a powerful narrative
that connected race and class in order to promote a unified experience of “marginality,”
which challenged hegemonic narratives of race and class by promoting commonality
across them. Despite the overwhelmingly positive response students had to this
approach, a counter-narrative was being maintained below the surface, a narrative that
indicated the teachers’ emphasis on social class conflicted with some students’ lived
experiences of difference within their community.
Discourse 2: Racial divisions riding below the surface.
One afternoon, after a meeting that took me away from the morning class, I
stepped into Dan’s office as he was wrapping up lunch. “You missed the fireworks this
morning!” he said. “Fireworks? What happened?” I asked, and the conversation that
ensued became a powerful indicator that two narratives, one teacher sanctioned, and
the other student produced were at play regarding race and social class in the ASHP
classroom.
Mrs. Miller had been out for the day, and Eddy Meijer, a regular sub and
participant in this study, filled in for her. Later in the day I caught up with them to discuss
the so-called “fireworks.” According to the two teachers, an outburst occurred in the
second half of the class, after a first hour that was engaging students in a discussion
about what Mr. Carpenter termed, “the social welfare safety-net.” He later explained that
this was a particularly touchy subject as it related to race and class in the ASHP

	
  

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classroom. Dan had intended to problematize what he viewed as standard perceptions
of welfare programs as a “an option of first resort” as opposed to a temporary means to
support oneself, and one’s family, in times of financial crisis. Due to the economic
troubles the Factory Town area has faced in recent decades, patterns of welfare
dependence have become generational among many families in Factory Town. Mr.
Carpenter’s intention was to challenge students to consider that the system was not
designed to support large numbers of people for long periods, and that the system was
not working for Factory Town. Rather, he argued that in many cases the system was
working against Factory Town’s residents by making them dependent on government
systems. He went on to explain several staggering misconceptions about the welfare
system, each of which were illustrative of the problem of its nearly ubiquitous
acceptance in Factory Town as an option of “first resort” in the city.
As this lesson progressed, some students grew uncomfortable, and began
talking to one another, or resisted through a lack of participation or subtle disruptions.
Finally, Stewart, a working-class, White male student who was sitting across from a
group of African American students stood up during the lesson and yelled, “Would you
please shut the fuck up!” The comment was directed at the group of African-American
students. At that point, Delvon an African-American male student who was in the group
stood up and responded, with “No, you shut the fuck up,” which was directed at Stewart.
In a matter of seconds, Stevie, a female of both African-American and Caucasian
descent stood up, turned to the group of African-American students, waved both of her
hands in front of her body to draw attention to her brown skin, and shouted, “It’s not
about that, how ‘bout if I tell you to shut the fuck up, then what are you gonna do? Huh?

	
  

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What are you gonna do then?” Taken aback, Delvon then turned to her and, again,
shouted “Shut the fuck up, bitch” charging the discussion with both gender and racial
overtones. Sensing the racial overtones of this confrontation, and recognizing that
something had to be done to decompress the situation, Mr. Carpenter
uncharacteristically shouted above the class, which at this time was abuzz with
comments and conversation about what was happening, “This is what they want from
you, they are trying to divide you.” Delvon gained a supporter in Tina who both
continued to argue with Stevie and Stewart about their comments, and the situation was
escalating. At this point, Mr. Carpenter made a decision he now regrets. He confronted
Delvon, and in an attempt to make his point about division, he looked at Delvon and
said, “Can’t you see that nobody cares about you?!” Misunderstanding what Mr.
Carpenter was trying to say, Delvon took this as a personal attack and confronted his
teacher. He was insulted, angry. He likely felt disrespected and then turned his
frustration toward Mr. Carpenter asking, “who the fuck are you talking to?”
At this point, recognizing his mistake and his inability to de-escalate the situation,
Mr. Carpenter exited the classroom leaving his seasoned substitute to quell the dispute.
Surprisingly, the absence of Mr. Carpenter changed the dynamic in the classroom
completely. The students’ shock at his exit caused them to get quiet, and Mr. Meijer
asked everyone to sit down and take a deep breath. The students complied, and when
Mr. Carpenter re-entered the room they were dead silent. Upon entering, he erased all
of his lecture notes from the whiteboard and wrote one phrase in bold letters, “We’re all
we have.” He then wrote, “In my career as a teacher, I have never left a class because
of the way students were treating one another.” As he made his way to the front of the

	
  

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room, he publicly apologized to Delvon, and the rest of the students. After the outburst
things went on quietly in the classroom, and students worked on a project in groups. At
the break, Stewart and Delvon made their apologies, but Delvon never apologized to
Stevie. Delvon also apologized to Mr. Carpenter for using profanity, but nothing else.
The incident served as a “rupture” in the heretofore-official narrative of unity in
marginality, which had come to characterize the classroom discourse around race and
class. As the two teachers unpacked the incident in our conversation, it was clear that
they were struggling to understand exactly what had happened. Mr. Carpenter
wondered aloud if somehow the message their curriculum had been trying to send had
missed the mark. He had implored the students to recognize that they had more in
common than they realized, and that their commonality could be used as a way to resist
structures designed to reproduce the social order that was maintaining their oppression.
Instead, the day’s and perhaps the year’s curriculum seemed to unravel during the
racially charged verbal free-for-all.
For Mr. Carpenter, and for me, the incident clarified some spatial and narrative
processes that had previously been on the periphery of my understanding of the
dynamics of difference in the classroom. I had detected that racial tension was not far
from the surface throughout my observations in the classroom. The obvious racial
divisions in the student-chosen seating arrangements of the classroom were the first
signs of tension I noticed. Figure 5 is based on a sketch from my first set of field notes
from observing the ASHP classroom in February. There was a clear division among
White students who sat at the far end of the room at a set of three tables, and Black
students who sat at the opposite side of the room, and those who were either very good

	
  

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students, or those whose racial phenotype did not fit the norm for Black or White, sat
near the front in the middle of the room. In other words, students segregated
themselves by racial lines in the classroom. This division rarely, if ever, changed even
during small group work as students were given the option of choosing their group
mates. Though the curriculum included units that addressed “power and oppression”
related to race and class, the civil rights movement, how the Irish became “white,” and
made regular references to current events related to racial anxieties, only a handful of
students engaged deeply with these topics in class discussion.
My field notes indicate that many students, particularly African American and
White working-class males tended to resist these discussions. Several students
including some, but certainly not all, of the students who were involved in the incident
above, consistently held side conversations during class discussions, slept through
class, or were otherwise “off task” when issues of race and class arose in discussion.
As a result, a tacit distance was maintained around issues of race through spatial
practices, hegemonic discursive practices, and a school culture that maintained order
and civility over and above critical, and direct engagement with these issues. It is
important to emphasize that none of the four teachers whose classes I observed
ignored the issue of race. It was a part of the explicit curriculum in each class.
However, this incident underscores that racial divisions did persist in these classrooms
despite the attempt to address them in the explicit curriculum.
The result is a classroom space in which race is visible and is made relevant by
the teachers and others who engage such issues, yet it is engaged with an unwritten
expectation that the topic be handled at a “distance,” indirectly, or as a collective

	
  

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experience rather than an intimate engagement with students’ individual and nuanced
experiences of racial division in their community or beyond. While students learned to
use the concepts and terminology of a critical discourse they were simultaneously
unable, or unwilling, to engage critically with their teacher’s as narrators of these ideas.
Thus, even in a classroom space where teachers and students maintained a relatively
high level of critical engagement, and consistently revealed and problematized
hegemonic power structures, the deep boundaries of difference were maintained. This
maintenance of racial and class boundaries was achieved through “defiant” and
“compliant” forms of student resistance. In the sections that follow, I argue that the
spatial and narrative maintenance of racial boundaries, or what could be considered
local “otherness,” produced in the racial segregation of the city, and maintained inside
and outside classrooms, plays a significant role in students’ perceptions of global
“otherness” as well.

	
  

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Figure 5
Racial Distribution of AHSP Classroom

Policing the boundaries: The production of the “global other.”
Decidedly, Factory Town is a city segregated along racial lines--physical, social
and discursive. The city is comprised of racially homogeneous neighborhoods, internally
divided through class divisions, marginalized by mainstream media, popular culture, and
popular discourse about the community. Factory Town is (an)“other” space, set apart
from communities surrounding it through discursive, and spatial practices. Few people
visit the city as outsiders, and those that do are often greeted with a certain level of
uncertainty and distrust. Students encountered race and class issues in the ASHP
classroom, and directly discussed them. However, racial and class tension was just
below the surface of the classroom discourse. Distance, produced through spatial and
discursive practices- hegemonic and deliberate, along with the produced sense of

	
  

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isolation students felt as citizens of Factory Town Michigan, resulted in notions of a
“global other” that was also distant, collective, and undefined for many participants.
The “Global Other” has been theorized in literature surrounding global education,
and in fields as far reaching as international education and cultural anthropology. Darby
(2003) argues the terminology, “global other” is just a “reinscription of the postcolonial
other” whose production was theorized most elaborately by Said (1979). I use the term
to delineate a “generalized other” individual or group, which is produced through
discursive and spatial practices that maintain perceived boundaries between people and
across international boundaries. Thus, this generalized, distanced “other,” though
mostly constructed of misconceptions and stereotypes produced in media images, plays
the foil to the construction of “normality” for those participants in the study with little
experience outside their local contexts.
Factory Town’s recent history, characterized by extensive economic hardship
and the subsequent struggles associated with unemployment, de-industrialization, and
generational poverty, have produced powerful anti-globalization, and xenophobic
narratives which portray the “global other” as an adversary. The city’s manufacturing
history contributes to a strong sense of nationalism among many Factory Towners.
Though there are few remaining GM jobs in the city, the streets are lined with GM
automobiles. In fact, the type of car you drive is still a subject of early inquiry into who
you are and “where you stand” in relationship to the community. Thus, the perception of
increasing immigration among Latino/Hispanic populations, and the addition of a
growing Islamic population have resulted in new forms of racialized “othering” that are
maintained through spatial and discursive practices.

	
  

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As described above, the teachers in the ASHP classroom aim to bring issues of
difference to light, and support a sense of unity among their students, but unfortunately
many students maintain a quiet resistance to this curriculum, holding onto the racial
boundaries they have come to learn through navigating the segregated spaces and
discourses of the city. This resistance limits the level of critical discourse around
difference students experience in their daily lives. As a result, critical discussions about
difference are often silenced or sanitized within this context. In the absence of critical
engagement, dangerous misconceptions of the other are maintained. As a result
engagement with the global other through the global education curriculum, and through
interactions within the local community are often unconstructive, and in some cases
even harmful. The experiences of Ahmed, a Muslim-American, born in Factory Town,
illustrate the implications for avoidance of critical engagement around the various
constructions of difference swirling in the spaces and discourses of the postindustrial
city.
Policing the Boundaries: Policing the Body.
This section of the chapter explores an ontological narrative of one participant’s
experience of embodying difference at a time of significant social crisis. A detailed
analysis follows the narrative, linking it to concepts introduced earlier in the chapter. I
will argue that this narrative is illustrative of how young people come to learn about “the
global other” through experiences in local context. The chapter concludes with a
discussion of implications for this process for global, and other place-conscious
educators.

	
  

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At 20 years of age, Ahmed was the oldest student who participated in the study.
Since WHS is a dual enrollment program, many students spend an extra year
completing college credits toward an Associates degree on the shared campus of the
community college. Ahmed still needed to complete a college course in order to receive
his diplomas for his high school degree and an associate’s degree in electrical
engineering. Though Ahmed’s high school credits had been fulfilled, he still visited
Workman on a daily basis, as he waited for friends, studied between classes, or simply
chatted with former teachers including Mr. Carpenter. Ahmed recognized Mr. Carpenter
as a mentor and a friend who had helped him to see the world in a different way. He
describes it like this:
Mr. Carpenter probably had the biggest impact on me. And taught me a lot of
things about… I don’t wanta say Social Studies but like current events and given,
he’s the reason that I have such a huge pride with humanitarian things. The
reason why I like to go on protests and the reason why I try to do research and
figure out what’s going on around everywhere. He just taught me a lot of things
that I can really look back on.
Ahmed’s hesitance to describe what he learned in terms of a school subject area is
compelling. While the curricular subject matter makes up the centrality if Mr.
Carpenter’s teaching style, his greatest impact on Ahmed seems to be his ability to
connect the content to current events, something Ahmed saw as outside the range of
the Social Studies. Ahmed appreciated Mr. Carpenter’s stance of pushing the
boundaries of the teaching orthodoxy that imagines students as needing to be shielded
from controversy and ambiguity. However, the curriculum of the classroom is not the

	
  

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only space in which Ahmed’s humanitarianism is rooted. Though Ahmed never directly
associated these aspects of his identity, his past experiences as a marginalized person
in the context of Factory Town may have impacted his worldview as well.
The racial fragmentation of Black and White spaces in Factory Town can, at
times be unified in the presence of a growing Muslim American community. As
members of this relatively prosperous, and community-minded group increase their
presence in the city, they are recognized as outsiders. These changes in the local
context incite fear and discomfort in many of Factory Town’s traditionally represented
racial groups. However, Ahmed reported that he felt Islamophobia was no more
prevalent in Factory Town than in any other community he had visited in the United
States. During the two years I visited Factory Town, I was not witness to any
Islamophobic acts or discourse. Yet Ahmed’s narratives of growing up in Factory Town
tell a different story. They simultaneously explain some of Ahmed’s political and ethical
positions, but they also paint a complicated picture of Factory Town’s tolerance for
changes in the local cultural landscape.
In our second lengthy conversation I directly asked Ahmed if he had ever
encountered Islamophobia in his hometown of Factory Town.
Not necessarily. Not by the majority absolutely but there’s always going to be
somebody there that’s gonna be screaming out the window of the car as they’re
driving by, something like that. Just as you have people who hate African
Americans here, you have it all over the place. I don’t feel that it’s concentrated
Islamophobia, here which I really appreciate. Cuz that would just make my life
horrible. And I’d hate to feel targeted for something like that. So… yeah, I don’t

	
  

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feel it that badly here as I see it in other places. No, like in my, in my school, my
elementary school, I was always harassed. I was always called Iraqi or terrorist
or things like that from little kids. But as I got older, I didn’t really see that, that
much in school. The last time it happened was probably in 8th grade. It didn’t, it
never really happened here. I mean, kids joke around. They joke, like African
Americans, they joke about the color of their own skin and so, I mean, kids are
always gonna joke around cuz, I mean, you can’t always get angry about things.
Though Ahmed acknowledged the existence of Islamophobia in this excerpt, he
downplays the effect it has had on his life. He rationalizes it as a re-appropriation of
racial hatred that plays out among racial minority groups through humor aimed at
variations in skin color. Though he alluded to some past experiences in this
conversation, he may not have felt comfortable sharing the depths of his struggle with
Islamophobia at this point in our relationship.
In our final conversation, which lasted more than 90 minutes, Ahmed spoke
passionately and positively about his schooling experiences, and the cultural home he
had as a member of his Masjid (mosque) on Factory Town’s Southeast side. He
described his view of globalization, which was primarily based in his own experiences
having traveled to Saudi Arabia, and Egypt in the prior year.
I’d say globalization is probably the awareness of what else is outside your
borders, and not seeing people as just another country but as people. Before (a
trip to Saudi Arabia) I’ve always seen countries as just, like my childish
interpretation of a foreign country other than America was… another country that
wasn’t quite as good as America and then I had like one idea (of) what that

	
  

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person might look like and then I just thought of everybody looking that way. And
now, I see thousands of people within other places and I don’t necessarily see
borders anymore. At all. Like borders don’t even matter to me. (Ahmed, interview
2)
His cultural status, his contact with individuals in other parts of the world, and his
religious and ethnic identity, perhaps not surprisingly, led Ahmed to the most elaborated
vision of “globalization” of any student, or teacher I spoke with during the data collection
phase of this study. Yet, these insights about globalization came at a cost, one that
Ahmed was not willing to share until the final minutes of our conversation, and only after
I had asked him if there was anything he had not had a chance to tell me in our
conversation that he thought I should know. His response indicated that his prior
comments had downplayed the impact of Islamophobia in his former school had on his
life. He begins his story when he was living in a “tough” neighborhood on the Western
edge of Downtown Factory Town.
That house. I really didn’t like that house. At that house, nothing but bad stuff
always happened at that house. As soon as it was burned down, ugh, I don’t
know, we were all in grief and everything. While I was there, we had a huge pet
cemetery. Before we moved to the house, my cat ran away, and a year later my
other cat gets hit by a car, but after that the other pets kept dying. And we were
pretty much forced into moving into that house because of bad situations and
circumstances, financial stuff. My Dad having problems with finding work, and
we were just havin’ problems after problems. And I don’t know, that house was
pretty much just a symbol of depression for me.

	
  

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I awkwardly asked if in a strange way he was glad to see it go. This was a question I
would not have asked in retrospect, but his tone of relief about its burning led me to this
question.
Well, (he laughs), I lived there, but in a way I was almost glad to see it gone. I
think I was probably able to be happy once we got a new house. And, like
everything just seemed so dark there. I mean like the neighborhood just seemed
dark and gloomy, the house inside was dark and gloomy. When I was walking
inside the house after it was burned, which everybody told me not to do but I did
it anyway, it was just so dark and sad and everything was just. Well, like when I
was living there, everything was dark and gloomy and it still stayed that way,
even after everything was on fire. I mean like everything was gone, and it was
just… I hated that place. And once my parents found a new place I felt relieved
and I felt like I could get rid of my depression and I felt like I could move on. And
also we had all the problems with police like during the whole thing, because they
kept accusing us of burning it down, on top of that. Which was even more of a
burden, and they kept pushing that down our throats. And eventually they came
to the conclusion that we didn’t do it. Still it just made us feel like crap. We had
no idea who did it, or why. But they knew it was arson. But they don’t know
why… they don’t know if it was a hate crime, they don’t know. The house was on
West Pearl (Street), in a real trashy neighborhood. As soon as the house was
burned down we were trying to salvage things out, almost every three weeks,
and one day we go back there and we noticed, hey our trampoline is gone. The
neighbors went through all of our stuff and they just started taking crap. They

	
  

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were like ‘ eh, they don’t need it now.’ They went inside the house and started
taking stuff, my trampoline, its like… ahh… I ‘m so glad we’re out of there. So, I
didn’t like the neighbors I didn’t like the house, I didn’t like the memories, I didn’t
like anything.
Without prompting he continued on, like he was counting down a list of things he had
been waiting to say.
I also wanted to take a picture of an elementary school. Eisenhower. I wanted to
take a picture of that. I thought that was really cool. I loved that place, but I
hated all the kids there. I was always picked on, I was always the odd one out.
And, all the kids were mean they were mouthy, and I was at that school during
the 911 thing.
In the fall of 2003, two years removed from the 9-11 terror attacks on the World Trade
Center, the Pentagon, and Shanksville Pennsylvania, Factory Town was a city in
turmoil. Plant closings and downsizing were still very active processes, the demolition
of once grand landmarks of prosperity (Buick City, Chevy in the Hole, Fischer Body, and
other massive industrial complexes) was underway (or soon would be), and the country
had suffered its first “foreign attack” since Pearl Harbor. The war in Afghanistan was
already raging, and the case was being made for a second war in Iraq. Slowing down,
and speaking in more deliberate tones, Ahmed describes what life in elementary school
was like during that time for him, a Muslim-American born in Factory Town.
They were raising the flag. I was like right there next to the flag, and they started
calling me ”Iraqi.” I’m not from… I’m not even Iraqi. They kept calling me Iraqi
and they kept calling me terrorist. And like, I wasn’t into sports or anything, so I

	
  

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was never playing basketball, I was never playing football. I was always off on
my own. I was like always off like walking around by the trees and looking at
birds, or looking at the plants, or just sitting and relaxing looking at the plants, or I
was running around like a monkey on the jungle gym. And like kids always hated
me because I was different and I only had like one real friend. Now they’re trying
to connect with me now that we’re all older, they’re like ‘ah, hey, how ya doing?’
I’m like, ‘ I don’t want to talk to you.’ And they’re all, I don’t want to say what I
want to say, but they’re all idiots. Like one time I got beat up, like it started off as
a rough game, and then they all started like stomping on me, into the ground,
and they all started beating me up. And the principal didn’t even do anything to
them. So my mom went to the police and she told them what happened, and she
took pictures of all of the marks all over my body, you could actually tell what kind
of shoes they had on, from all the imprints on my back. She took that to the
principal, and she tried to get that all taken care of… Yeah, I’ve got a long history
at that school. I don’t know what possessed them to do it. I think they were just
stupid. Then, every time I’d try to get away they’d just keep goin’. I think that
once they got into it, they got into this blind stupidity and they couldn’t, they just
kept beating the crap out of me. Only one kid, met me up from back then, and
he’s probably the only one, and he asked for me to forgive him for all of the crap
that he did to me. I thought that was so amazing, I never thought that anybody
would ever apologize or ask for forgiveness for doing that kinda crap to me when
I was little.

	
  

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Recounting this event, Ahmed vacillates between an overall feeling of isolation, and the
event that solidified his “outsider” status. He drifts between explanations of this behavior
that are related to the stereotypical story of the boy who does not play sports, to blatant
Islamophobia without settling on either one. He also indicates that no action was taken
by school officials, identifying his lack of faith in the institution to provide support for him
in this time of need. Throughout his narrative he layers in reflections on his own
success, a stark contrast from many of the students who perpetrated this violence
against him.
That group of kids that went to Eisenhower are all failures, and dropouts, and
nobody is successful. I’m a college graduate. I was the one who was being
beaten and it actually makes me feel really good, like a silent victory and they’ve
ruined their lives. They were beating me in the ground, and I made it. They
ruined their lives. I do feel good about that.
Ahmed closes his narrative with a sense of triumph against the odds. He recounts this
story using another public narrative, “success in the face of adversity,” though he told
this story for what I would argue are different reasons. Ahmed struggled with his
decision to tell me this story, but he understood that its telling was an act of resistance
to the oppression he has felt, at times, growing up Muslim in a community that viewed
him as an outsider. Ahmed wanted me to tell his story to a broader audience, one that
could make a difference for students like him who have or are currently struggling with
being marginalized, pushed to the periphery, and made to suffer for complicating long
established racial boundaries. Ahmed’s retelling of this story, serves as a way for him

	
  

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to use his marginal status as a form of power, to accept it and turn it against the center
in order to make change.
Ahmed’s story could have easily had a similar, tragic ending to that of the train
hoppers described at the beginning of this chapter. Thankfully, Ahmed has found the
support he needs at home, among the members of his Masjid, and even within the
school community to view his marginal status as a source of strength, and to feel
empowered to use his voice to take action against injustices like those he has suffered.
Despite Ahmed’s ability to move beyond this struggle, his narrative is illustrative
of the ability of hegemonic power to react to disrupted boundaries. Though he is a
native of Factory Town, Ahmed’s peers viewed him as one who did not fit within
prescribed categories of difference. He represented growing fears of the global other,
intensified by global outsourcing, immigration, and the--then recent--terror attacks of
September 11th, 2001. Though Ahmed’s story illustrates the vigor with which these
boundaries are protected and maintained, and describes the physical disciplining of the
embodiment--indeed the body--of the “other, it is not entirely different than the racially
charged outbursts that erupted in ASHP.
Closing ideas
In a 2002 column, Thomas Friedman wrote the following passage commenting
on the state of cosmopolitan thinking in a technologically global age.
Thanks to the Internet and satellite TV, the world is being wired together
technologically, but not socially, politically or culturally. We are now seeing and
hearing one another faster and better but with no corresponding improvement in
our ability to learn from, or understand, one another, so integration, at this stage,

	
  

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is producing more anger than anything else." That "anger" can have and is
having deep economic and cultural effects. We should be helping students
understand them (Friedman, 2002).
Friedman’s quote, one of the few passages he has written with which I agree, provides
a logical transition to the final section of this chapter. I devoted a lot of space in this
chapter to exploring local level discourse regarding race, class, and boundaries of
difference. This detailed local level work allows us to consider the implications of placemaking and the ways in which the places we are from shape our learning about
difference. Even in a classroom where the curricular aims were to disrupt commonly
held notions of difference and division, and a radical marginality was promoted in place
of division, the boundaries were difficult to cross. Resistance to narratives of “unity” and
the policing of boundaries continues.
In Factory Town, the term “boundaries” signifies more than metaphorical distance
between race and class. During the height of the city’s manufacturing past, city’s
worked feverishly to maintain racially segregated neighborhoods, Craig Ruff (2011) A
Michigan policy analysis explains the spatial history of segregation like this,
Tens of thousands of southern blacks moved to Michigan cities in the 1910s,
1920s, 1930s, and 1940s to escape rural poverty and win jobs in the world’s
most vibrant industrial economy in Detroit and today’s I-75 cities of Pontiac,
Factory Town, and Saginaw. … Federal, state, and local lawmakers enacted
policies to confine blacks’ housing and neighborhoods and restrict other
opportunities. Middle-class blacks faced the same housing discrimination, Jim
Crow practices, and even KKK violence as did poor families. Highway and

	
  

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housing policies ravaged black commercial and residential areas in cities, while
governments subsidized the movement of primarily white families to suburbs, into
which both homesteads and jobs were moving. (Ruff, 2011).
Though many of these policies have been repealed from law the physical and cultural
boundaries they produced live on in spatial and discursive practices. Though school
segregation remains a problem in Factory Town, Workman High School is relatively
diverse with a White student population of 37%, an African American student population
of 58%, and a Hispanic population of 5%, according to the school’s website. I quick
search of suburban and urban schools surrounding Workman revealed staggering
levels of segregation. In one suburban high school 81% of the students were White,
16% were black, and 1% were Hispanic. The nearby urban high schools registered an
African American students population of 98%, and a White population of 2%. As an
integrated school, Workman served as a unique opportunity to engage directly with
issues of race in a racially diverse environment.
Integrated classroom spaces can serve as contexts in which the spatial and
discursive boundaries between self and other can be challenged, disrupted and
problematized. Our early experiences with difference shape or perceptions of
“otherness” as our world expands beyond the local environment. Numerous authors
across Place-based, and Global Education (Becker 1982, Hanvey, 1976; Noddings,
2005; Merryfield, 1996; Greunwald, 2003) assert that coming to know the other requires
an understanding of the factors which have come together to shape our own
worldviews. Merry Merryfield underscores this need, encouraging those in search of

	
  

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understanding the global “other,” to explore their own ways of knowing, often built upon
colonial and Eurocentric models of thinking (Merryfield, 1996).
Therefore, the task for place-based educators is to reveal the hegemonic
processes that produce our experiences of racial and ethnic difference, in order to blur
and open space for the exploration of connections. To close, I return to John Willinsky’s
quote that was used to open the chapter. “’Where is here’ is less perplexing than ‘Who
am I?’ …more perplexing yet, is the question, ‘What am I that I am here?’ (Willinksy
1998, pg. 9). While Willinsky was discussing the nation or “national identity,” it seems
that some of the most difficult questions of place-based education are also related to the
notions of “here” that are produced inside and outside the classroom. The physical and
discursive boundaries between race and class can only be toppled if the hegemonic
power structures that produce them are exposed and deconstructed by students. The
examples shared in this, and the previous chapter, are illustrative of the scale of this
task.
Preview of the Next Chapter
Chapter Three was devoted to an examination of students’ perceptions of place
and temporality as it was read in the spaces of the postindustrial city. Chapter Four
tightens the focus to examine how spatial and discursive practices of place-making
produce racial and class boundaries, dividing the city internally and externally. When
these boundaries are challenged, they are physically and discursively maintained
through policing. In the fifth and final chapter, I extend the discussion of implications for
place-conscious practice in education, and consider the reassertion of “place” in
education as a path to possibilities for change.

	
  

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CHAPTER FIVE
Toward A Globally Conscious Place-based Education
To be in the world, to be situated at all, is to be in place” (Casey, 1993, p. xv).
We are always situated within, and in relationship to place. Our daily interactions
with the places we inhabit are profoundly pedagogical. They teach us who we are and
where we are in relationship to other people and places. Places are inscribed with, and
reify power relations stabilizing, directing, and organizing “who we are in relationship to
where we are” (Casey, 1993, p. xv). This study, conducted in the postindustrial city of
Factory Town, has examined the place-making practices of fifteen students and two
teachers in order to come to a complex and critical portrait of the pedagogical power of
place in one postindustrial city. In this chapter, I review the insights from this study and
discuss the implications it holds for place-based education, global education, and critical
pedagogy as it relates to the previous fields. Then I reflect on the methodological
limitations of the study related to my positionality, and the research design. Finally, I
propose additional ideas for research related to place-based education.
Insights on Place-making, Temporality, and Possibility
The postindustrial landscape of Factory Town is emblematic of dramatic social
change. Factory Town’s neighborhoods are inscribed with the marks of these changes.
The abandoned homes, demolished buildings, brownfields, and empty storefronts are
all physical reminders of economic collapse. Entire city blocks stand vacant, with
houses open to the elements, overgrown vegetation, and cracked sidewalks.
Throughout the study, as students told stories of their experiences within these spaces,

	
  

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it was evident that they informed their social imagination about the trajectory of their
city, and the possibilities it held for them in the future. Lana explained that Factory Town
“isn’t building up, we’re just tearing down.” Others, like Nikia saw possibilities in the
postindustrial places of the city, and demonstrated a longing for change that could serve
as a pathway to possibilities.
Nostalgic narratives, both reflective and restorative (Boym, 2001), tend to
dominate the discourse around the city of Factory Town. Social, political, and economic
narratives are produced and reproduced in local and national media accounts, everyday
discourse, and as was described in detail above, are even inscribed on the spaces of
the city itself (Cope & Latcham, 2009). One cannot deny the effects of economic
collapse in the city, but these nostalgic narratives privilege neoliberal explanations of
social change, while masking, or at least blurring, the histories of racial and class
injustice within the city. When the stories people tell of economic decline are directly
related to outsourcing, alternative stories are excluded. This conceals other processes
such as racist housing practices, spatial and racial fragmentation, and the
disempowerment of labor unions, all of which contributed to the city’s current economic
woes. Students were typically unable, or unwilling, to connect the social ills of the city
with structural forms of racism, but instead emphasized the economic origins of the
problem in explanations such as these: “GM took the jobs overseas,” or “there are no
jobs,” were common responses. When these responses were absent, so too, was any
alternative explanation.
Nostalgia for a once-thriving economy, however, was not the only sentiment
produced in the place-making students enacted as they read industrial and residential

	
  

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places in the city. Other students described what Willinger refers to as “longing,” or the
“savouring of different possibilities… [longing is] about swaying back and forth in
reflection, yet never quite arriving (Willinger, 2007). Longing, as I read it in students’
responses to photographs they took and the stories they shared of places in the city
challenged the ability of nostalgia to fix aspects of the past in a chronological pattern.
Rather, when I recognized longing in students’ words they were observing the power of
the past to influence the present, and connecting the implications of both to their
possibilities in the future. Nikia described her imagination of the past of the city as a
“promised land,” and linked it to the opportunity she has to become educated. In her
mind, the prosperity of the past is not a distant memory. Rather, it informs who she is,
and her sense of what is possible for her to achieve in her life after high school. The
trouble with nostalgia is its power to maintain a narrative of decline and loss, and its
ability to limit students’ imagination of possible alternatives to narratives of decline.
Longing, as the term is used in this study, opens up possibilities by complicating the
downward trajectory of nostalgic narratives and offering a radical in-between-ness in
students’ sense of a linear temporality.
In effect, economic narratives of nostalgia placed the origin of the problem at a
distance for students. When General Motors or global economics were narrated as the
culprits, little could be done to solve the problems of the city. As one student put it, “It
isn’t like I can just make another GM, so people have jobs again!” The solutions, for
most young people in Factory Town, were out of reach as long as the problems were
recognized as being at a sphere of influence that extends far beyond their own, or as
issues that occurred in the distant past.

	
  

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The students who participated in this study also cited the ASHP classroom as a
place where narratives of their city were produced. They talked about the powerful
experiences they had traveling on a field trip around the city with their teachers, learning
the economic history of the city. My observations of the field trip activity revealed that
while the trip provided a great deal of valuable local history, and promoted a sense of
civic pride, it also worked to maintain nostalgic and economic narratives of change in
the city. Students tended to accept the narratives of history presented in the classroom
as unproblematic, and accurate. No students cited uncertainty about what they learned
from their teachers. Rather, they accepted the historical narratives presented in the
classroom as “truths” they may not have learned had they not been exposed to the
social history of the city their teachers presented.
Fixing the narratives to economic change and promoting a linear trajectory of
history provided a starting point for students’ knowledge of local history, but it also
worked to maintain a sense of the city’s prosperity as a thing of the past. It limited the
in-between-ness and longing students described when they discussed residential and
industrial places. It was not until later in the semester, when students were given the
opportunity to reimagine their city, and organize a plan for social change that students
were able to put their own experiences of the places and spaces they inhabit to work, in
order to rethink its current state.
Insights on “Situatedness,” and Contesting Boundaries
Employing ethnographic methods, and participant observation in the classroom
setting, I observed an ongoing tension between a discourse of racial unity that was
promoted by the teachers, and entrenched racial boundaries maintained through spatial

	
  

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and discursive practice outside the walls of the school. As my account of the racially
charged outburst in Chapter Four describes, racial tension was just below the surface of
the classroom discourse. When this ongoing tension met with attempts of the teachers
to problematize racial division, many students responded with resistance, policing their
sense of boundaries between self and “other” in the city. The racial dividing lines
students perceived between one another indicates that they relied heavily on
dichotomous constructions of self and other. My conversations with students,
observations of racial divisions within the city, and discursive practices, which set the
city apart from its geographical neighbors, indicate that the physical spaces of Factory
Town actively maintained students’ views of a divided world.
U.S. census data indicate that 60 years after the Jim Crow era, the nation
remains highly divided along racial lines. Nowhere in the nation is this truer than in the
postindustrial Midwest. Factory Town is among the most segregated urban areas in the
nation. Furthermore, according to many participant accounts, and my own observations
during my time in the city, it is also highly divided by social class. The physical and
social boundaries that internally divide Factory Town also set it apart from the rest of the
nation. My observations and conversations with students and teachers at Workman
High School indicate that these boundaries are policed quite heavily through discursive
practice, social and personal narratives, and at times through physical violence. This
policing was evident as students’ lived experience of racial division met the progressive
agenda of the ASHP curriculum, and its emphasis on breaking down ethnic and cultural
barriers.

	
  

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Students also described a sense of isolation associated with the spaces of
Factory town. Students described Factory Town as “set apart” and distant from its
geographic neighbors, a perception that was at least partially produced by “othering”
from outsiders and through reading differences between Factory Town, and the places
students visited in the surrounding area. All of these processes situated students’ as
marginal, outside the realm of regional, national, and global engagement, and in an
“island”-like context of postindustrial Factory Town. In short, discursive and spatial
practices maintained a sense of isolation for many students in Factory Town. Despite
this sense of isolation, many students also reported having connections with family in
other states and countries, taking trips to nearby communities, and in some cases living
part-time in other parts of the country. Yet, the discursive power of marginality
maintained students’ sense of isolation from a world outside the city.
Like the divisive racial boundaries students perceived inside the city, perceptions
of Factory Town as geographically and socially removed from the rest of the world relied
on dichotomous notions of space characterized by a sharp sense of “here as opposed
to there.” These depictions of Factory Town produce the sense that the city is distanced
from normality, and isolated from the rest of the world. This perceived distance
promotes apathetic points of view, and a lack of implicatedness in the events and
process occurring outside of the city (Knapff, 1978). Through the lenses of this study,
discursive and spatial practices illuminated students tendencies to fix themselves in
relationship to “others” via binaries such as “self and other,” and “us and them. Such
binary visions influenced students’ sense of identity, pushing some to disassociate with

	
  

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their community, and others to develop a strong sense of belonging associated with
Factory Town.
The data produced throughout this study confirm research in the fields of placebased education and environmental psychology, which have already made close links
between human identity and place-making practices. More importantly, the aspects of
temporality and situatedness that were produced through students’ interactions with
postindustrial places have implications for the fields of place-based education, global
education, and the related field of critical pedagogy.
Implications for Place-conscious Education
Place-conscious practices and theory in education have arisen from a nearly 30year history of environmental and ecological education. One result of this growth
trajectory has been that the field has primarily been associated with rural contexts. This
study address the implications of place-making for students in an urban, postindustrial
context, and intentionally blurs the boundaries of three fields, placed-based education,
global education, and critical pedagogy, each of which has overlapping interests in
addressing issues of power and oppression as they manifest at various spheres of
social influence from the individual to the global.
The “findings” described above indicate that the non-aestheticized places of the
postindustrial city produce nostalgia for the past, but also a radical temporality which
blurs our, typically, linear sense of time. Therefore, while place-based educators
consistently call for classroom practices, which draw attention to local contexts and the
histories that have produced them, it is important that this is done with student
experience in mind. Classroom practices which fix linear and one-dimensional histories

	
  

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(political or economic) to the places students inhabit tend to maintain narratives of
decline in postindustrial contexts.
My observations suggest that place-based practices also require space for
students to express their readings of the physical and social spaces of the city, and their
perceptions of possibilities for those places. This requires drawing attention to students’
own place-making practices, and their involvement, or “implicatedness” in actively
reaching out to shape the places they inhabit. As Fettes and Judson (2011) explain,
Place-making can also occur subconsciously through repetitive experiences of place.
Revealing the hegemonic practices of power maintained in these subconscious
interactions with places allows students to see the dual nature of the production of
place; how places are structured by our interactions with them, but also how places
structure and maintain are sense of ourselves.
“Critical issues of race, class, gender and other aspects of culture can become
abstractions unless these issues are grounded in concrete experiences that always take
place somewhere” (Gruenewald & Smith, 2008; p. xxi). Place-conscious education
requires attentiveness to local manifestations of these social constructs in social,
spatial, and temporal terms. Using the above description of the racial boundaries
produced by the city as an example, it is clear that time and space play important roles
in how social divisions are maintained. Disrupting and deconstructing these boundaries
requires bringing them and their harmful effects to the awareness of students. More
importantly, it requires space for students to deconstruct how these boundaries have
come to shape who they are in relationship to their neighbors—near and far.

	
  

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Students’ relationships with their local communities are varied and complex. As
we saw in Chapter Three, local histories and memories informed students’ perceptions
of temporality, and possibility for students’ sense of themselves and their community in
a multitude of ways. For some students, the postindustrial plight of Factory Town was a
reason to disconnect, let go, and seek out access to economic and life opportunities
elsewhere. For others, their allegiance to the city was galvanized by the collective
struggle of prior generations and a hope for the future of their community.
Without careful attention to the ways in which students read the spaces of their
city, it is possible for teachers to overlook how place-making (Fettes & Judson, 2011),
and the narratives it produces, become “recipes for structuring life itself” for the students
in their classrooms (Bruner, 2004 p. 709). Careful attention to place-making requires
opening pedagogical spaces in which students can interrogate their individual
experiences of place and the ways it shapes their sense of who they are.
Place-based education, which provides such space, could decrease the
perceived distance between students’ lives and seemingly distant political and
economic processes such as those producing globalization. When it is enacted
effectively, place-based education can also promote a critical distance between
ourselves and our community, enabling us to see the familiar as strange, and disrupting
the taken-for-granted-ness that characterizes most of our interactions with the places
we inhabit. In short, placed-based education connects students to the dialectical
relationship between local practices of everyday life which shape who they are, while
providing enough distance for students to recognize how these spaces are structured by
power relations, and in turn how those power relations can structure their own

	
  

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perceptions of themselves in the world. Students and teachers live local lives, but their
lives are informed by local, national, and global discourses that inform their perceptions
of their “place” in the world.
Implications for Global Education
Though global education is typically not associated with place-based education, it
is a field that has arisen due to large-scale changes in spatial, and geographic relations.
In practice and theory, global education tends to emphasize economic, social, and
political interconnectivity, though its broad focus tends to diminish the importance of the
local particularities of place. The curricular aims of global education, as they are
identified across the field by Kirkwood (2010), who reviewed these foundational
definitions (Alger, 1986; Alger and Harf 1986; C. Anderson 1994; L. Anderson 1990;
Becker, 1979; Case, 1993; Hanvey, 1976; Kneip 1986; 1987; Merryfield, 1997; Tye
1990, 1999; Tye and Tye, 1992), include the following: “to support the development of
multiple perspectives, comprehension and appreciation of cultures, knowledge of global
issues, and the world as interrelated systems” (p. 6). In short, global educators aim to
broaden students’ awareness of, appreciation for, and knowledge of issues beyond their
personal and local experience, extending outward to international contexts. Still, “local
thinking persists even as the world becomes more economically interdependent,”
argues Joseph Stiglitz (2007, p. 278). In other words, people largely understand
themselves through their everyday, face-to-face interactions with other people who are
in close geographic proximity to them, and who share a local history, culture, and
environment. Yet, we live in an era that is increasingly defined by global

	
  

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interconnectivity. This is to say, global education is necessary, but it must also attend to
the particularities of local contexts.
Because we live in a global society, our sense of implacement is changing
dramatically. I argue that what we experience as globalization is actually just one aspect
of the larger phenomenon known as the postmodern condition. Postmodernism informs
a broader sense that we live in a fragmented world, with porous borders, and
experiences that are multi-layered and inter-textual. The postmodern world, aided by
space-compressing technology, is characterized by motion. We refer to global trade as
“flows of capital,” immigration as the movement of people, and international political
changes as “global shifts.” Indeed, the space in which our modern lives unfold requires
a nearly perpetual state of motion, shifting from work, to entertainment, to family life,
and back again in the span of several minutes via a laptop computer or smart phone.
While a vast majority of place-based educators seek to promote a sense of
rootedness in a local environment, like Gruenewald and Smith (2008), I argue that the
perpetual motion of the postmodern, and globalized world requires an ethic of care for
places (Gruenewald and Smith, 2008; Noddings, 2005) that is portable. Though we may
learn to care for one specific place through place-based education, the sentiments,
knowledge, and skills this requires can be applied to any place we may inhabit in the
future. Furthermore, because the world is made up of porous boundaries, we must
consider how our places are increasingly interconnected with other places. As Williams
aptly asserts in the epigraph to Chapter One, “the world is places” (p. 25). Therefore,
global education must maintain dual foci; balancing an outward looking sense of the

	
  

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world, with an inward exploration of who we are and how we are shaped by the places
we inhabit.
Effective global education should involve learning to know and understand the
other (Tye and Tye, 1990; Zachariah, 1989; Noddings, 2005) as has been indicated by
numerous authors across the field. I argue that coming to understand oneself and one’s
local community is the first step in achieving this aim. This requires first the recognition
of racial and social boundaries, and then a radical openness to throwing them into
question. Merry Merryfield argues that if we are to understand the global “other,” we
have to understand our own ways of thinking (Merryfield, 1996). Here, I hope to extend
Merryfield’s work, by advocating for global education that is attentive to the spatial and
discursive practices that produce and maintain these boundaries in the first place.
The fields of place-based education and global education are attentive to spaces,
but they seem to be looking in opposite directions. The texts produced in relationship to
this study illustrate the need for globally attentive place-based education and a placeattentive global education. As the postmodern era, characterized by globalization,
continues to result in shifting perceptions of place educators in both fields must
challenge the dichotomies of “here and there” and more importantly “us and them.”
Perhaps the current time calls for the same radical in-between-ness that led to hope
and possibility for Nikia and her peers as they read the spatial reminders of a not so
distant past that dot the postindustrial landscape of their city.
Limitations of this Study
As with all research, this study has limitations. To begin, my positionality as a
white male researcher in a community where I was a relative outsider shaped the way

	
  

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many students interacted with me. As I noted earlier in Chapter Two, I believe my
positionality caused some African-American male students to be hesitant to be part of
this study. Another researcher, whose positionality may have produced greater trust
with these participants, would have mostly likely gathered a broader range of
participants. Furthermore, my choice to gain entrée via a distant connection to Mr.
Carpenter positioned me as an adult associated with the school in the eyes of many
students. As a result, they felt most comfortable talking with me in school spaces. This
dynamic shifted over time, as students came to see that I was something other than a
student, but not exactly a teacher either. That being said, my perceived affiliation with
the school influenced my access to spaces beyond the close proximity of the school.
Had I gained entrée via student connections, or via another institution outside the
school. the data I collected could have looked very different from those which were
produced in this study. Furthermore, my data collection began approximately midway
through a school year. As a result, I was not able to observe participants as their
relationships to one another unfolded over the course of a school year, or longer.
Additionally, this dissertation developed out of a genuine curiosity about the
narratives of globalization that are produced in classrooms, and in everyday life in the
postindustrial city. Through the process of analysis, writing, and peer review, I came to
the realization that while this study had implications for globalization, it was really an
exploration of place-making in a postindustrial city. By the time I had written the
dissertation in its current form, considerable time had passed, and I was working with
theoretical frames that were relatively new. Thus, the “findings” presented in this study
are, in many ways, starting points. As such, I have been set on a new trajectory toward

	
  

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thinking and learning within the paradigms constructed around place-conscious
pedagogy and critical geography.
Another limitation to this study is related to the number of participants I chose to
involve. As data collection progressed, more and more students asked to be involved
with the study. Excited by the prospect of getting “multiple perspectives” I chose to allow
all of the students to participate. How would the data have differed if I would have
limited the number to three or four focal participants, and how would this have shaped
the outcome of the study? It is impossible to know the answers to these questions. Yet,
as I think about the implications for further research in this area, I am compelled to
imagine how this section of writing might be different if any of the above had been as
well.
Future Areas of Inquiry
My work in this dissertation has left me with countless questions and ideas that
suggest the need for more research. The setting of this research was particularly
important to the ways I structured my study, and the findings it produced. While
questions still remain about how students in postindustrial communities both enact and
learn from practices of place-making, I am also compelled by the experiences of
students in other kinds of communities. How would the findings of a similar study
conducted in rural Iowa look different than these?
Another potential area for inquiry is related to teacher preparation. How can we
prepare place-conscious educators with the content knowledge and skills necessary for
preparing students for a globalized world? Another question is related to curriculum
theory. How might global educators and multicultural educators apply place-based

	
  

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concepts to their work? As local, national, and global boundaries continue to blur how
best can we prepare teachers, pre-service or in-service, to negotiate the ambiguities of
space, time and culture that result? I hope these questions can extend the dialogue
begun in this study, and that this work can continue to open up spaces for hope and
possibility in all places.
A Final Word
Factory Town, unlike any other community I have been lucky enough to know, is
“real” in ways that only a native Factory Towners can truly understand. I will never claim
to know the community like any of the people who graciously agreed to be interviewed
and observed as participants in this study. I do know, to use Mr. Carpenter’s words,
that Factory Town is “real.” Coming to know the community has made me a more
soulful and caring individual. Factory Town is faced with enormous challenges, but it is
also a place where the best of human intention can be seen. Whether it is a committed
teacher dedicating her life’s work to the empowerment of the young people in her
classroom, a young man working to inform the community of problems that seem worlds
away, or a young woman sharing a dollar with an elderly person in need, I saw great
acts of humanity in Factory Town. All the while, I read about and heard second-hand
accounts of the ongoing human tragedies that have become the city’s image in the
American media. Factory Town, like any other community, is searching for its place in a
changing world, grasping for connections to its past, and fighting for its perilous, but
hopeful, visions of the future.
I hope the readers of this work will gain something from dialoging with the words
of DeAndra, Mr. Carpenter, Ahmed, Nikia, Lana, Dominic, Marcus, Jimmy, Jessica,

	
  

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Elizabeth, Julius, Mrs. Miller, Mr. Carpenter and the collective wisdom of those whose
words were not used in this dissertation. Each participant was committed to sharing
their experiences, in order to contribute to a bigger project, one that would be a part of a
movement toward a better community, but also a better world. I hope my part in this
work has contributed a new set of voices to vital conversations about the purposes and
practices of education in an ever-changing world.

	
  

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