Mapping out our space in stories: A high school curriculum for a social justice tour of San Francisco

How do youth engage with the spaces around them? In what ways might students connect their personal, lived knowledge to the politics and intricacies of space? The manners in which schools approach outside-of-school learning includes non-critical Place-Based Learning and field trips as optional material; however, doing so breaks the powerful relationship waiting to be explored between Critical Geography and Critical Education. This field project uses Henri Lefebvre’s concepts of The Production of Space and Rhythmanalysis as foundations to argue for the implementation of Critical Geography into high school curricula, and offers a 9-week high school curriculum to create a student-led social justice tour of San Francisco for educators to get started. Inspired by Dr. Natchee Blu Barnd’s Ethnohistory Methodology class at Oregon State University, the curriculum builds upon the Freirean concept of critical consciousness by using critical notions of space and geographic methods as the bridges to complete the final project: a social justice tour of San Francisco