The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School CREATIVE PLACEMAKING WITH A UNIVERSITY ARBORETUM A Dissertation in Learning, Design, and Technology by Jaclyn Dudek 2019 Jaclyn Dudek Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2019 ii The dissertation of Jaclyn Dudek was reviewed and approved* by the following: Heather Toomey Zimmerman Associate Professor of Learning, Design, and Technology Dissertation Advisor Chair of Committee Tyler Hollett Assistant Professor of Learning, Design, and Technology Marcela Borge Assistant Professor of Learning, Design, and Technology Vivian Yenkia-Agbaw Professor of Curriculum and Instruction: English Language Arts Susan Land Professor of Learning, Design and Technology Head of the Department of Department or Graduate Program *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School. iii ABSTRACT This dissertation argues that place is an agent in the construction of meaning and in social interactions and experiences of communities. This study seeks to understand placemaking as undertaken by a university theater-arts community and examines how the arboretum in which they perform becomes an agent in the community members’ learning. By studying an established community of practice, the scope of this study is unique in that it traces the emergence of a placemaking community from its inception across seventeen years of activity. The university arboretum setting serves as an important case study of placemaking in higher education because the arboretum is quite different from other spaces within the campus proper. Often learning spaces are siloed into specific buildings and segregated by disciplines. However, the study presents a case of a university learning space that is not discipline bound. Through a community of practice frame, the dissertation broadly asks; how does the community engage with, imagine across, and align and inscribe practices with the arboretum as a learning partner. Poststructural orientations based on the work of Deleuze and Guattari are used to explore enactive, embodied, and more-than-human approaches to learning with place. Various ethnographic methodological approaches are utilized along with forms of creative mapping. The dissertation advances theory by using the concept of meshworks and applies it to placemaking to investigate how people inhabit and make their own places of learning. The work advocates for and adds to the use of methods and techniques aligned with sensory ethnography as well as the collection and analysis of affective and non- representational data. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES ........................................................................................................................................ x LIST OF FIGURES ..................................................................................................................................... xi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ....................................................................................................................... xiii Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 1 Research Purpose ............................................................................................................................. 1 The Spatial Turn in the Humanities and Education ......................................................................... 2 University Settings as Learning Spaces for Placemaking ................................................................ 4 Learning-with-place. ........................................................................................................... 4 Placemaking and agency. .................................................................................................... 6 Finding Oneself in Place: Dwelling at the University ..................................................................... 7 Study context: Shakespeare in the Arboretum. ................................................................... 7 The Arboretum as a place of querencia through SITA. ...................................................... 9 Theoretical Orientation .................................................................................................................. 10 Placemaking as meshworking: Building theory around university learning spaces. ........ 11 Research Questions ........................................................................................................................ 12 Overview of Chapters .................................................................................................................... 12 Chapter 2: Theoretical Orientation and Literature Review ......................................................................... 14 Overview of Placemaking .............................................................................................................. 14 Early placemaking. ........................................................................................................... 15 Community placemaking. ................................................................................................. 16 Critical placemaking ......................................................................................................... 17 Creative placemaking. ...................................................................................................... 17 Placemaking in Education Research .............................................................................................. 18 Situating placemaking within place-based learning and place-based education............... 19 Placemaking as a lens in education research. ................................................................... 20 Theoretical Orientations ................................................................................................................. 21 Embodied and enacacted approaches to cognition and learning ....................................... 21 Expanding learning partners to more-than-human systems. ............................................. 22 Agentful Topographies: Place as an Agent in Peoples’ Learning .................................................. 24 Placemaking as Meshworking: A Metaphor for Emergent Activity with Place ............................ 25 Materials and spaces of learning as meshworks. ................................................. 27 Wayfaring: Movement in a meshwork. ............................................................... 29 Meshworking in the Context of SITA............................................................................................ 31 v Research Questions ........................................................................................................................ 34 Chapter 3: Methods ..................................................................................................................................... 35 Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 35 Emplaced Ethnography .................................................................................................................. 37 Emplaced ethnography as a method to study agentful topographies. ............................... 39 Emplacement as a phenomenological inspired approach. ................................................ 41 Methods for moving through place. .................................................................................. 41 Mapping and creative cartography as sources of data. ..................................................... 42 Modes of emplacement. .................................................................................................... 44 Study Setting, Contexts, and Participants ...................................................................................... 45 Setting. .............................................................................................................................. 45 Context ........................................................................................................................................... 47 Shakespeare in the Arb: A community of practice. .......................................................... 47 Rehearsals. ........................................................................................................... 48 Ensembles. ........................................................................................................... 49 Participants........................................................................................................................ 49 Levels of participation. ........................................................................................ 50 Naming conventions for research participants.. ................................................... 52 2017 Production: The Tempest ....................................................................................................... 53 The Tempest summary. ..................................................................................................... 54 Themes in The Tempest. ................................................................................................... 55 Literacy and the power of language and learning. ............................................... 55 Dreaming, sleep, and wakefulness. .....................................................................