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Chapter 27
Place-Based Education as a Call from/for Action

Michiel van Eijck

This section features four accounts of the kind of struggles educators encounter
once they engage in place-based activities. These struggles are characterized by
overcoming dualisms such as global/local and subject/object. From the four chap-
ters, simultaneously, one can learn how “place” guides educators to ways along
which they can overcome such dualisms. The four studies presented in this section
share a notion of place inextricably bound with human action. As highlighted
repeatedly in this section, the word “place” refers to the ancient Greek word plateia
(plateίa, street), a central place in town where people came to both talk to and
listen to others and where human action is “taking place.” Human action, in turn,
can be taken as a dialectic unit, which is realized both on the ideal and material
plane, thereby uniting global/local and object/subject dualisms (Leont’ev 1978).
Departing from human action, place can be considered the channel through
which students act globally from their locality, that is, from their “own” world to
the world “out there,” and make “their world” relevant to others as something that
is “taking place.” The other way around, a sense of place is required for students to
take action locally on global issues “taking place” in the world “out there.” More
or less, the same counts for the subject/object dualism. On the one hand, place-
based education objectifies what the students-in-action (subject) are doing once
taking action locally on issues that matter to “their” place. Simultaneously, on the
other hand, place connects the subject to the object-of-action by allowing students
(subjects) to take action on local issues that matter to them.
In summarizing this section, I highlight the notion of place as related to the dialec-
tics of human action. Thus, each of the chapters can be read as a call from action to
the readers of this book, that is, as a message from subjects’ real human action “taking
place” locally. As well, simultaneously, each of the chapters can be read as a call for
action – a global message with the object to allow others to take action based on what
is “taking place” locally. In so doing, I provide an outlook in regard to this book’s aim

M. van Eijck
Eindhoven University of Technology

D.J. Tippins et al. (eds.), Cultural Studies and Environmentalism, 323
Cultural Studies of Science Education, Vol. 3, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3929-3_27,
© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010