Thinking about landscapes and landmarks
Dr Beth Mackintosh
"May's Rock", Whitesands, by Nicola Schoenenberger
This rock, ‘May’s rock’ as wonderful landscape artist and printmaker Nicola Schoenenberger and her family refer to it, is a landmark on a beach that has special significance for many who live or visit the Pembrokeshire Coastline.
The sight of the rock on a glorious sunny day in summer, or a blustery day in winter is a friendly sight on a happy day, but also a ‘cognitive anchor’ on a day of unease or great challenge. In our family, we don’t call this rock May’s rock, but we love that the Schoenenberger family have given it a name, which we have since adopted too, and we have photos of us on the rock across generations and in all weathers and seasons and with many various faces and visitors joining us for the regular photo snap.
At CATALYST we explore the importance of cultural heritage in our economics and social sciences modules - how people, countries and places cannot simply be measured by their economic value or standard of living. Culture, language, fine arts, music, poetry, dancing and crucially our natural environments - these are the things that make the human experience so rich and worth living.
In one activity (which I mentioned in a previous blog post - ‘Thinking with Maps’), where we have to curate our own personal gallery and then learn to compromise with others, we have an opportunity to add a landscape or landmark heritage that they would like to protect to that gallery. The opportunity to source a landscape and landmark that has unique meaning to them and to also select and make a case for a more globally recognisable one is a powerful opportunity to think about landmarks as cognitive anchors on both a personal and more global scale. These landscapes and landmarks are both anchors, but also bridges to unite us and towards new possibilities.
Liam Gearon, author of Religion, Education and Cultural Materiality: UNESCO World Heritage Sites
As Liam Gearon has explored in his remarkable work, the World Heritage Sites of the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) are as a strangely neglected global resource for teaching and learning and yet they offer a wonderful conceptual and practical approach to uniting pupils across geopolitical and ideological contexts. I have seen this potent resource in action on our CATALYST programmes as students share their pathway and relationship with a well-known monument, and how they come to listen carefully to others as they share their lesser-known locations and artefacts of place and why they hold such cultural, spiritual and personal meaning.
Tanya Shadrick, author of The Cure for Sleep, and her Concentrates of Place.
The author Tanya Shadrick has gifted her followers, and those who know her work, with the stunningly powerful ‘Concentrates of Place’ experience, where she invites us to ‘creates repositories of memories’ that represent and celebrate and commemorate the ordinary and the everyday places that make and shape us.
It is a huge privilege to have worked with students from all over the world (we now have students and alumni from over 60 countries worldwide) and to have had them all share the place, artefact and traditions that make them who and what they are.
This work and these ideas connect to our philosophy lens and modules, where we unpack the idea that conceptions of self are often exploring the entangled, and different, questions of who, what, why and where we are. Our context, community and our cultural materiality, as Gearon refers to the UNESCO sites, are not always given the educational attention they should as both grounding anchors but as possibilities for new ways of being in the world together.
I hope this past weekend (a Bank Holiday in the UK) afforded all our community at CATALYST the chance to check-in with their selected ‘monument of meaning’ and that it provided a bit of comfort and grounding and also some inspiration for the term and future ahead.
