Portraits of Place: Critical Pedagogy in the Classroom

To explore the politics of place, and to challenge the politics of place, is becoming paramount for young people more than ever before. In this chapter I argue for young people to be offered opportunities within schools to explore what it means to belong to a place, in order to understand the ways in which their politics of (un)belonging is tied up with social categories of class, race and ethnicity. I present young people, residing in Bermondsey, South London, engaging with place-based discourses critically and collaboratively. Through emotive portraits created by young people in Art lessons, interviews with teachers and also with paired students, and extensive questionnaires, critical insights into the significances of everyday place-based racialised and classed belongings were investigated. The young people’s reflections and discussions about the nature of identity and belonging revealed what young people perceive as the pathologisation of their locales and (imagined) communities by wider public, media and political discourses.