ICLS Symposium | iY-1_SPATIAL-JUSTICE | Learning With and Against Place Towards Spatial Justice

In this symposium, we consider the diversity of ways that learners conceptualize and engage with places. Building on growing work in the Learning Sciences on learning in/with places, we bring together contributions that highlight the gap between learning with a place and learning about a place by examining cases in which learners complicate ideas of places as good or bad. The contributions show a wide variety of ways this can happen, from students’ changing concepts of a “developed” place, to how prior knowledge of a city can shape one’s perception of neighborhoods as safe or unsafe, to how children might reclaim or resist visions of their school as policed, to how community members resist simplified representation of their places. Together this work suggests increasingly nuanced ways of treating place that can in turn support designs of just learning in places.