112th Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers
San Francisco, California
March 29 – April 2, 2016
“Mobile Geographies of Learning”
Organizers: Jennie Germann Molz, College of the Holy Cross, USA; Zsuzsa Millei, SPARG, University of Tampere, Finland
This session explores how education, learning and place making in educational spaces intersect with transnational mobilities, performances of national and global citizenship, and digital technologies. We ask what kinds of knowledge, subjectivities, and geographies emerge as learning becomes more mobile and interconnected. For example, new technologies that support mobile and remote learning enable parents, teachers, and children to tap into the educational potential of global travel. From Herodotus to the 18th-century Grand Tour to contemporary study abroad and gap year programs, ‘travel has been pursued for the sake of knowledge’ (Adler 1989, p. 1382). This assumed affinity between global travel and education has inspired a range of alternative educational practices such as roadschooling and worldschooling.
At the same time, whether children physically travel or not, their learning spaces and curricula are transformed by digital connectivity to the world beyond the classroom. Access to mobile digital learning resources has spurred new hybrid models of interconnected learning that promise to disrupt or hack conventional education. These innovations lead us to ask how increased interconnectedness shapes children’s learning and the kinds of knowledge that are produced. In many cases, developing students’ sense of global citizenship is a key learning outcome of mobile education. Thus the confluence of education, technology, and transnational mobility also raises important questions about place, belonging, and citizenship in an increasingly mobile and interconnected world.
This paper session invites contributions that interrogate these intersections of learning, technology, mobility, citizenship, and place across all stages of learning, from preschool to post-secondary education and beyond. The questions we are interested in exploring include: What happens when classrooms become globalized, or when the world is the classroom? How is mobile learning interwoven with performances of national and global citizenship? How do parents, teachers, and children imagine place, and their place in the world, in the context of mobility and interconnectivity? What kinds of knowledge do travel produce? What new mobile and hybrid geographies of learning do emerge when children learn online and on the move?
Relevant themes might include but are not limited to:
· Travel, transnational mobilities, and global citizenship
· Digital technologies and mobile education
· Hybrid, disruptive, or hacked educational models
· Place, belonging, and citizenship
· Alternative education movements
· Worldschooling, roadschooling, and digital nomadism
· Curricular efforts to globalize the classroom
· Global citizenship education and curricula
· Family mobilities and mobile lifestyles
· Educational travel, study abroad, and gap year programs
· Youth citizenship and transnational mobility
· Preschool, K-12, and post-secondary education
· Travel and teaching
· International education
Please email abstracts of no more than 300 words by
Friday, October 15 to Jennie Germann Molz (
jmolz@holycross.edu). Successful submissions will be contact by
October 20 and will be expected to register for the conference and submit their abstracts online at the AAG website by
October 29, 2015.
REFERENCE:
Adler, J. (1989) ‘Travel as performed art’, American Journal of Sociology, 94(6): 1366-91.
