The Significance of Place in the Curriculum of Children’s Everyday Lives

In the Western tradition, place is a concept that has most often been subordi-nated to space and time — concepts related to ubiquity and infinity that have been more useful to the universalistic aspirations of colonization (Casey, 1997). The processes of globalization have both contributed to placelessness — the loss of place, the destruction of places, the commodification of place, the economic and technological blending of places, and the production of places that look remarkably similar to each other — and at the same time increased awareness of the importance of place (Adams, Hoelscher, & Till, 2001; Casey, 1997). Place can be defined most straightforwardly as “an area or space that is a habitual site of human activity and/ or is conceived of in this way by communities or individuals [emphasis in original]” (Brey, 1998, p. 240). For a number of years, studies of places focused on their economic efficiency. More recently, attention has shifted to questions about social justice with an emphasis on the experienced actualities of place (Smith, Light & Roberts, 1998). Critical humanist geographers ’ interpretations of place have also been concerned with how human creativity is hemmed in by large-scale social