Monsters in the Classroom by Adam Golub & Heather Richardson Hayton

Author:Adam Golub & Heather Richardson Hayton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

A Place-Based Theory of Horror Pedagogy

Place-based pedagogy is about more than simply designing curriculum with real-world locations in mind; it is a very specific educational ideology that embraces local places as sites that have inherent value in the learning process. Eric L. Ball and Alice Lai provide a thorough overview of the movement, explaining place-based pedagogy as an ecohumanist approach to education that grew out of the philosophical teachings of Wendell Berry.13 Those educators who subscribe to this pedagogical methodology believe that “curriculum and learning objectives are … contingent on the place in question,”14 and they take advantage of local sites—such as historical buildings, noteworthy landmarks, nearby businesses and artists, and other features of the immediate environment. Granted, the primary point of such a theory of teaching is the local, embracing the neighboring environment as relevant to learning as much as those places described and pictured in textbooks and on the internet, and, thanks to this emphasis, “place-based educators … relativize the focus of their pedagogies and the kinds of materials they include for study with respect to … place.”15 Students recognize what they are studying at a potentially less abstract level in the concrete, real-world community that surrounds them.

Yet, if formal place-based pedagogy relies exclusively upon the local environment, how can we teachers of horror possibly take such an approach with romantic, and especially fantastic, texts? The key lies in locating what aspects of those texts can be found in the real world—after all, Walpole’s goal was to imbue traditional romance narratives with realistic elements in his creation of the Gothic subgenre. E .J. Clery explains that “Walpole wanted to combine the unnatural occurrences associated with romance and the naturalistic characterization and dialogue of the novel.”16 In the case of Dracula, for example, Stoker repeatedly situates his supernatural vampire in the environs of his contemporary London, places that would have been local referents to his original readers, including the zoo at Regent’s Park, recognizable buildings along Piccadilly and in the East End, and nearby communities such as Purfleet in Essex. While the physical world of Dracula may be anything but “local” to modern readers, at least initially—especially students from the U.S., who are unavoidably removed from the novel in both time and place—that world becomes decidedly local when those students travel to London and come to recognize the places signified by Stoker’s literary signifiers. Taking a place-based approach to teaching a text such as Dracula in London, then, realizes Ball and Lai’s ideal that “the inclusion of local texts, artifacts, and performances can in itself be a critical move that implicitly confronts the marginalization of place while simultaneously providing one more route—via consideration of the politics of culture—for more explicitly critical inquiry.”17 Content becomes augmented by context, and students more easily understand the subtleties of a text by seeing it as a concrete, local narrative grounded in a real place.

Because Stoker references so many real locations in Dracula, that novel benefits particularly well from a place-based pedagogical approach, which is why my Gothic study abroad course focuses heavily on it.

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