New Place-Based Educational Initiatives in the Welsh Curriculum and Some Considerations of Legacies of the Canadian Experience: A Conversation.

In this paper we examine aspects of new, placed-based educational initiatives in the new curriculum for Wales and the parallels between this and similar Canadian initiatives. The paper grew out of an email exchange between the two authors growing out of a Welsh graduate class where these matters were discussed, both at the level of philosophical underpinnings and in light of classroom and school experiences of those participating. A new national curriculum in Wales enables greater teacher autonomy than previous curricula and encourages the prioritization of localized knowledge and inquiry (Adams, 2023; Donaldson, 2015). This has caused some debate about the merits of giving teachers autonomy to design their own place-based curricula (Chapman, 2020; French et al., 2023). The overarching aim of this paper is to show how such curricula have the potential to afford an understanding and experience of knowledge, and being, that contrast with often-hidden legacies of mainstream Westernised schools. Using analysis of philosophical perspectives from hermeneutics and ecology, and examples given from place-based, inquiry-led learning in Canadian schools, we argue that place-based curricula potentially allow for an ontology of relations to be experienced that could be enriching for both students and teachers.