Research

Dr Greg Mannion, from the University of Stirling, has been conducting research into the benefits of place-based learning.

 

Greg Interviews Shela Ryan.

In this project, Stories in the Land, we have been researching the links among storytelling, story making, journeying, and landscape through engaging learners with the past practices of the drovers. The history of droving and the drovers  is a starting point for the educational work but this was not explicitly or simply a history education project nor is it a project that seeks to teach people ‘about’ places in a transmissive way.

This is because, the project asks participants to engage with places and the past through making active
responses to place and to past generations. We did this through facilitating journeys in the same landscapes and routeways drovers once took alongside a set of other tasks and activities such as storytelling but also cooking, foraging, firelighting, singing songs and doing crafts. Importantly, these facilitated educational experiences in contemporary landscapes included opportunities to listen to, retell stories drovers might have told, and opportunity to take part in constructing new fictional stories and reflective diaries about the past and their contemporary experience place. We characterize Stories in the Land as a form of critical geographical and environmental education. In practice this took the form of place-and generation-responsive education because it asked participants to consider our contemporary connection to other generations and the places inhabited by them in the past and by us now.

In the following sub-sections you can explore how research informed Stories in the Land through:

(1 ) our understanding of the role of story and landscape (PDF)

(2) considering premises for place- and generation-responsive education (PDF)

(3) collecting and analysing evidence from the participants (forthcoming), and

(4) offering findings from the analysis (forthcoming)