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16 Educating-Within-Place: Care, Citizen Science, and EcoJustice 201

aries obscuring critical questions about how places are constituted and connected
to one another (Nespor 2008).
Regardless of these approaches to PBE and the arguments tabled for one over
the other, they represent attempts, with varying degrees of success at establishing a
theoretical foundation for PBE. While Gruenewald’s philosophy is informed by
Freirean critical theory, a deconstructivist member of philosophical poststructural-
ism, and Theobald’s philosophical roots remains obscure (Stevenson 2008),
Bowers’ philosophical roots are more eclectic. Central to his philosophy, notes
Mueller (2009), “is the premise that cultural knowledge and language carry forward
root metaphors that encode and reproduce cultural ways of knowing and human
relationship with the Earth’s natural environments” (p. 1034). Primarily informed
by a variety of postmodern philosophers, namely critical theorists, his work is heavily
influenced by Gregory Bateson.
Our philosophical entry point is somewhat different; the philosophical forefather
of the deconstructive movement – hermeneutic phenomenology. While decon-
structionism is primarily oriented toward the ethical and political (Moran 2000),
hermeneutic phenomenology tends toward the ontological, human existence, or as
2
metaphysical philosophers refer to it, being. Furthermore, hermeneutic phenome-
nology, as a body of philosophy, should be of great interest to those attempting to
understand, “themselves as part of the studies of the interaction between man and
world” (Wollan 2003, p. 38), and in this sense, it is an appropriate philosophy for
approaching the interrelated phenomenon of place, being, and education. What is
more, it is our contention that such a philosophical position has the potential to
contribute further to the theory of PBE.
The connection between place and being is essential, as we shall argue. And our
distinct approach to this contribution aims at illustrating this connection. As Malpas
(2006) observes, “place and being are inextricably bound together in a way that
does not allow one to be seen as an ‘effect’ of the other, rather being emerges only
in and through place,” and vice versa (p. 6, our emphasis). As we discovered previ-
ously, whereas earlier PBE movements focused upon learning about the environ-
ment, namely, “the land,” successive PBE movements have shifted this focus to
include “the community,” and contemporary PBE movements emphasize “differ-
ence” with a sociopolitical imperative, we are interested in the interrelationship
between place and being. Whereas previous movements’ concerns stem from
human displacements from nature, and more recently culture, our argument issues
from a concern over ontology, or being. Wary of the tendency to repeat the foibles
of our contemporaries, we do not subscribe to an ideal notion of place or being

2 In its upper case form “Being” is distinctly different from its lower case form, “being.” Being
(capitalized form) “is not a being, a God, an absolute unconditional ground or a total presence, but
is simply the living web within which all relations emerge” (Bigwood 1993, p. 3). Whereas being
is existence, Being refers to the primordial existence of our being. In other words, Being is, “that
which gathers particular beings together into a way of being and courses through them in their
coming to appearance (p. 146).