Key Principles of Place as Text / City as Text^® Pedagogy

10 Principles for Designing City as Text (CAT) Experiences

1. Work in small teams (2-4 people maximum)
2. Send teams to different places
3. Create deliberate contrasts between destinations
4. Develop writing assignments to help reflection
5. Make talking to people a requirement
6. Use public transportation
7. Refer to the four primary strategies of mapping, observing, listening, reflecting
8. Don’t start with experts
9. Use general reading materials as a starting point—don’t be too specific
10. Create opportunities for formal and informal conversations to debrief

CAT Pedagogy in Higher Education

1. Demands a connection between what is there and what is not there
2. Gives consideration to the evaluation of absence as well as presence
3. Pushes students to new levels of questions, such as “Who has power? “Who decides?”
4. Embraces third-person perspectives so as to create an awareness of one’s own “lenses”
5. Finds “comfort” in discomfort; asks students to accept the notion that confusion can be a good thing
6. Moves from “self-reflection” into “critical thinking”
7. Connects personal experience to scholarly inquiry
8. Questions the prevailing power structures and the production of “knowledge”
9. Highlights connection to the larger world; promotes global thinking about local experience
10. Pushes students so that they want to know how they know

Faculty Participation

When faculty participate in an NCHC Faculty Institute they can be reminded of what it is like to:

1. Work in groups
2. Have both structured and unstructured assignment time
3. Not be the expert
4. Feel saturated
5. Take risks
6. Feel frustrated
7. Try to remain open
8. Feel vulnerable about turning in assignments
9. Talk to people we don’t know
10. Gain or revise perspective