- About the importance of understanding where you’re at, where you are speaking, writing, thinking from: ungrounding/foregrounding the tools that everybody comes with by turning to place and collecting knowledge about that place that everybody comes in with
- Importance of when you’re at. How to teach history as part of science
- Exercise: Think of the place you know best. (10 minutes)
Free-write about that place and how you relate to it. Is it a park in your hometown? A piece of land you have been living on in recent years? A place you always come back to when you want to think and process? As a second step, write down the things you know about this place, anything that comes to mind. Who do you know in this place, what actors, human, non-human, and otherwise come to mind? As a third step, think about the ways in which this place and your expertise about this place/relationship to it informs and influences how you see the world and do science/research. Guiding questions: Do you think that what is true for this place might be true for any place in the world? Why/not?
Orienting yourself and participants in time and space: interactive exercises for orientation facilitate understanding context and foregrounding place-based knowledge. Assembling different orientation devices and thinking about a research and writing practice like a scavenger hunt allows for a playful introduction of scientific methods.
