Place-responsive Intergenerational Education

Chapter Number: Title: Place-responsive Intergenerational Education Author: Greg Mannion and Joyce Gilbert Word count: 5949 INTRODUCTION In this chapter we outline two premises that provide a viable theoretical basis for intergenerationally-focused, place-responsive education. On their basis, intergenerational learning is said to have occurred when people of more than one generation respond to generational differences within a place. The contribution we seek to make comes from bringing together theories of the socio-material (Barad 2003 and 2007, Grosz 2005, Edwards 2010, Hultman and Taguchi 2010), place and learning (Casey 1993, Nespor 2008, Somerville 2010 and Somerville et al. 2011, Gough and Price 2004), embodied experience (Grosz 1994, Ellsworth 2005, Semetsky 2013), non-representation (Thrift 2003, 2008, Lorimer 2005, MacPherson 2010), and intergenerationality (Mayall 2000, Vanderbeck 2007, Hopkins and Pain 2007, Mannion 2012, Field 2013). The chapter is structured as follows. First, we provide some context by outlining some selected policy issues around intergenerational programming and education. After providing a definition of intergenerational education, we set out two premises that inform our view of intergenerational education: FROM: Mannion, G & Gilbert, J. (forthcoming) Place-responsive Intergenerational Education. In R. Vanderbeck and N. Worth (Eds) Intergenerational Space. London: Routledge. (1) people and places are reciprocally enmeshed and co-emergent, and (2) people learn through making embodied responses to differences. We will provide sources for our rationale for these two premises. The two premises support a few key ideas emerging in the theory and practice of intergenerational practice: the importance of reciprocity of relations between generations, and the importance of 'place' in everyday embodied encounters between different generational members, and the idea that intergenerational learning is made possible through responding to differences which are found in the relations between generations and the relations between people and the places they inhabit. Whilst the premises will have wider application, we apply them here to our consideration of intergenerational education and derive some consequences for practice. One key consequence is that communication and meaning making in (intergenerational) education can be viewed as a non-representational practice or reconfiguring ourselves within the material world. Space here does not allow for an in-depth analysis of any empirical data from our on-going research which are described elsewhere (see Mannion and Adey 2011, and ‘Stories in the Land’ blog: https://www.storiesintheland.blogspot.co.uk). POLICY CONTEXTS International policy regimes are shifting radically along generational lines. Policy terms such as ‘active ageing’, ‘troubled youth’ and ‘family learning’ flag the desire of FROM: Mannion, G & Gilbert, J. (forthcoming) Place-responsive Intergenerational Education. In R. Vanderbeck and N. Worth (Eds) Intergenerational Space. London: Routledge. governments to take greater account of generational difference and the desire to harness intergenerational encounters and programmes in pursuit of social goods. In a nonexhaustive manner, it is perhaps sufficient here to notice three ways in which policy appears to validate intergenerational approaches to education. Firstly, we notice the many policies regarding the changing demographics of developed world populations. Policies here centre on the desire for the development of a ‘society for all ages’ as the age structure of the population is changing considerably with lifespan increases. Currently, in the UK, there are 10 million people over 65 years old. This number is projected to nearly double to around 19 million by 2050. A policy agenda has arisen within the UK, EU, OECD countries around the needs of this increasing population’s needs for active ageing, meaningful work if they desire it, and their participation in activities that enhance wider social cohesion and inclusion. The focus on intergenerational relations in policy arises in the US in the 1960s (Sanchez 2007) amid concerns for a widening generation gap, a rise in services for the young and old, and, as a result threatened social harmony and cohesion. Since then, an interest in intergenerational practice within and outside of formal education has grown since it is seen as ameliorating some of these challenges and social problems. The second policy area pertains to the on-going integration of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child into services, including educational services, leading to wider acceptance of children and young people as participants in society in their own right. In education, schools are seen as being remarkably resistant to fully taking on board these FROM: Mannion, G & Gilbert, J. (forthcoming) Place-responsive Intergenerational Education. In R. Vanderbeck and N. Worth (Eds) Intergenerational Space. London: Routledge. children’s rights agendas. In theoretical debates, commentators now advance the idea that young people’s participation cannot be understood outside of a consideration of place and generation (Mannion 2009). Lastly, in international educational policy, in the face of globalizing economies, there are concerns to improve the quality of school-based provisions. In policy terms in Scotland, where the authors presently work, the local expression of this is found in the new Curriculum for Excellence initiative (Scottish Executive 2004). This curriculum emphasizes ‘skills for learning, life and work’ alongside the development of ‘capacities’ of successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors. New approaches to teaching and learning are advocated such as outdoor methodologies and are encouraged to harness a wider array of partners in the delivery of education (including, for example, voluntary organizations, NGOs, youth workers, families, employers, health, social work, police, and community workers). A new kind of curriculum making is evoked that harnesses new places, new partners, and new processes linking, schooling to new contexts beyond the classroom. In policy terms, schools seem ripe for new and innovative experiments in intergenerational approaches, but the authors have found making intergenerational place-based education less easy to realise on the ground in part because professionals and locals alike are unsure about what constitutes place-related pedagogies for linking schools to local places and local people. In redress, this chapter seeks to delineate two viable premises for place-responsive intergenerational education and the consequences for practice thereof. FROM: Mannion, G & Gilbert, J. (forthcoming) Place-responsive Intergenerational Education. In R. Vanderbeck and N. Worth (Eds) Intergenerational Space. London: Routledge. DEFINING INTERGENERATIONAL EDUCATION Internationally, within education, there have been efforts to define intergenerational learning and education. For example, the European Network for Intergenerational Learning (see: https://www.enilnet.eu), takes intergenerational learning to occur when people of different generations work reciprocally in gaining skills, values, and knowledge. Coull (2010) defines formal intergenerational learning as any planned activities between generations that results in achieving set objectives for each generation involved. While some viable definitions of intergenerational education are emerging, theoreticallyinformed discussions of these have been lacking in the literature until recently. Understandably, much of the earlier commentary and research on intergenerational practice has set out to describe practice and look at outcomes in health, leisure, educational, public service and personal development (Ames and Youatt 1994, Brown and Ohsako 2003). Kaplan (2002) notes, however, that even though one generation may be nominally the provider and another, the recipient of some service, the outcomes may be reciprocally experienced. In empirical intergenerational research, Hammad (2011) has inquired into the lived experiences of people in places of conflict, showing how differences and connections across the generations are sustained. In schools, there is some empirical evidence that participants from all generations can benefit through learning via intergenerational FROM: Mannion, G & Gilbert, J. (forthcoming) Place-responsive Intergenerational Education. In R. Vanderbeck and N. Worth (Eds) Intergenerational Space. London: Routledge. encounter and mutual engagement especially in environmental learning (for example, Mannion and Adey 2011, Duvall and Zint 2007, Peterat and Mayer-Smith 2006). Out of earlier empirical work on place-based intergenerational practice, Mannion (2012) offered the following definition of intergenerational education. It reads: Intergenerational education (a) involves people from two or more generations participating in a common practice that happens in some place; (b) involves different interests across the generations and can be employed to address the betterment of individual, community, and ecological well-being through tackling some problem or challenge; (c) requires a willingness to reciprocally communicate across generational divides (through activities involving consensus, conflict, or cooperation) with the hope of generating and sharing new intergenerational meanings, practices, and places that are to some degree held in common, and (d) requires a willingness to be responsive to places and one another in an ongoing manner. (Mannion 2012: 397). Mannion (2012) goes on to suggest intergenerational education would aim to promote greater understanding and respect between generations, since, it is argued, without this outcome, almost any form of education that involves different age groups could claim the label. Hence, improved intergenerational relations is a key distinctive outcome for intergenerational learning. But Mannion (2012) argued improved intergenerational relations are not sufficient for an educational programme since improved relations need themselves to be purposeful in some FROM: Mannion, G & Gilbert, J. (forthcoming) Place-responsive Intergenerational Education. In R. Vanderbeck and N. Worth (Eds) Intergenerational Space. London: Routledge. additional manner. Intergenerational programmes are always located some ‘where’, so they will generate new meanings, practices and places through their work. Granville and Ellis (1999: 236) argue that a truly intergenerational programme must show a benefit and value for both generations and ‘demonstrate an improvement in the quality of life for both, and from that, an improvement in the quality of life for all’. Similarly, Mannion (2012) argues that intergenerational education will be a planned and progressive programme requiring the on-going production of new and improved relations between adults and children within and through place-change processes. Behind the above definition, lie many theoretical ideas and some key debates about agency, person-place relations, and meaning making which this chapter seeks to explore in more depth. We commence this exploration with our two premises. TWO PREMISES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES In this section, we explore two connected premises: (1) people and places are reciprocally enmeshed and co-emergent, and (2) people learn through making embodied responses to differences. We consider that these premises will have wider application to other studies of personplace interaction, but we apply them here to intergenerational education. Taken together, we will argue that they provide support for the above definition of intergenerational FROM: Mannion, G & Gilbert, J. (forthcoming) Place-responsive Intergenerational Education. In R. Vanderbeck and N. Worth (Eds) Intergenerational Space. London: Routledge. education, for onward programming and practice, and for researching forms of place- and generation-responsive education in formal, non-formal and informal settings. Premise 1: People and Place are Reciprocally Enmeshed and Co-emergent A range of theorists from across the arts and human sciences have been arguing quite cogently that people and places are best viewed not as separate objects, or separate objects in a distal relationship, but rather, are deeply reciprocally enmeshed and co-emergent. Educational theorists, anthropologists, geographers and social scientists alike often draw upon some key theoreticians such as Deleuze and Guattari, Latour, Haraway, Ingold, and Barad to support a broadly socio-materialist, or posthumanist view where the person and their context are seen as both in process and co-emergent in different ways. Feminist materialist positions too provide an account of this relational position promoting the idea that people and places are linked in a reciprocally emergent and processual manner (Hultman and Taguchi 2010, Grosz 2005). Of the many sources we could explore, Tim Ingold and Karen Barad provide the main rationales for our first premise. Ingold (2003), drawing upon Deleuze and Heidegger, asks us to understand people-andplace as a contingent unfolding interacting process. Ingold reminds us that people and places are relationally emergent through the activities of both people and many other entities and processes that allow life to unfold (including the weather, the activities of animals as much as humans). Ingold suggests that all living beings act within a unified field of relations (similar to Deleuze’s singular plane of immanence). Thus, Ingold brings the FROM: Mannion, G & Gilbert, J. (forthcoming) Place-responsive Intergenerational Education. In R. Vanderbeck and N. Worth (Eds) Intergenerational Space. London: Routledge. non-human / ecological together with the human social world within a relational field of action where nature and culture interpenetrate. Within this view, ‘organisms “issue forth” along the lines of their relationships, then each organism must be coextensive with the relationship issuing from a particular source. It is not possible therefore for any relationship to cross a boundary separating the organism from the environment’ (Ingold 2003: 305). We characterize Ingold’s position as ontologically reciprocal. Material feminists and ‘new science’ scholars alike have made strong claims about the links between social and material cultures. Barad (2003) has argued that discursive practices and material phenomena need to be understood in a linked manner. By discursive practice, Barad means ‘specific material (re)configurings of the world’ (Barad 2003: 819). All languaging of the world happens in the world and is part of its on-going reconfiguration. Rocks, soil, and people too, are seen as dynamic and undergoing change. For Barad, all ‘things’ including texts, people and all kinds of materials are going through similar dynamic processes of reconfiguration. Barad’s position can be characterized as a unification of epistemology and ontology – an onto-epistemology, as she puts it. Among the many issues that arise in theorizations of person-place, the question of where agency lies gives rise to much debate, particularly in socio-material and actor network (ANT) literature. Ingold (2008) draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘lines of becoming’ to argue for a focus on the power of relations in meshworks (rather than nodes or entities in networks – as in the case of some ANT theorizations). By this view, ‘action is not so much the result of an agency that is distributed around the network, but emerges FROM: Mannion, G & Gilbert, J. (forthcoming) Place-responsive Intergenerational Education. In R. Vanderbeck and N. Worth (Eds) Intergenerational Space. London: Routledge. from the interplay of forces that are conducted along the lines of the meshwork’ (Ingold 2008:212, italics added). In refocusing his definition of agency in this flowing, relational way – it is the actions of the spider that enlivens the agency of the web – Ingold reminds us that a form of agency may be the effect of technologies and objects but are likely to be revealing of a flow of others’ agencies ‘down the line’: others such as animals and humans who may have set technologies into motion. Agency no longer ‘resides’ in one location or in the human; it proceeds dynamically along some connective tissue which allows for the enactment of a relationship; within these interpenetrating socio-material relations, people and place co-emerge. Premise 2. People Learn Through Making Embodied Responses to Differences Next, we wish to show how a reciprocal onto-epistemology of becoming can be aligned with the idea of making embodied responses to difference. The second premise is therefore concerned with learning in ways that take account of place and difference in reciprocal relation. Put simply, the premise is that learning is understood as responding in an embodied way to differences that arise in a place through reciprocal processes of peopleplace. The onto-epistemological stance (Barad 2003) sees change in people and place a coupled way: knowing (or learning) is on-going creative, active and made possible through activity within places. Within an reciprocal ontology of becoming, learning is always situated and is an on-going happening and, therefore, could be said to always be locally ‘performed’ FROM: Mannion, G & Gilbert, J. (forthcoming) Place-responsive Intergenerational Education. In R. Vanderbeck and N. Worth (Eds) Intergenerational Space. London: Routledge. (Thrift and Dewsbury 2000), in all cases, as a result of the responses people make within a particular person-place assemblage or enmeshment (Ingold 2011). Learning is influenced by what people do in and to a place and how places act back on them over time. Our enmeshment, as Mulcahy (2012) puts it, brings a sense of ‘collective responsibility’ for what ensues. This responsibility is distributed across technologies, bodies, teachers, learners, desires, and places intersubjectively linking the social with the material in teaching and learning. Barad’s ‘onto-epistemology’ (Barad 2003) suggests learning is brought about by change in relation to other entities which are themselves in process of becoming different. Using Barad’s (2003) account we can begin to build a posthumanist account of difference as inbuilt into human-environment relations. In part, like Ingold, this is the idea that humans are always in some place intra-acting with it, and reciprocally being affected by changes in the environment. Because humans are part of nature, intra-acting with it, the human’s ways of knowing are inherently part of the unfolding of differences in nature. Hence, responding to these differences is central to learning and learning is part and parcel of becoming as an organism in a place. Drawing on Ingold (2011), because processes are always unfolding and we exist within the on-going events in educational processes, we suggest learning can only be understood to have happened in hindsight. It is only through looking back at events that we can create a story about how our knowing emerged in a connected way within the unified field of relations of our experience as a living breathing organism – the basis of the ontology of FROM: Mannion, G & Gilbert, J. (forthcoming) Place-responsive Intergenerational Education. In R. Vanderbeck and N. Worth (Eds) Intergenerational Space. London: Routledge. becoming outlined above. Following Ingold (2011), learning is a form of place-responsive enskillment that happens within and from our experiences of place-enmeshment. There are resonances here with pragmatism. As Dewey put it: ‘There is no such thing as sheer selfactivity possible: because all activity takes place in a medium, in a situation, and with reference to its conditions’ (Dewey, 1902, cited in Quay and Seaman, 2013:84). Quay and Seaman (2013) show us, through a useful re-reading of Dewey, how knowing, doing, and being in a place are intimately connected indivisible evolutionary processes of organism-inenvironment. Further, our embodied immediate, direct, emotional, aesthetic experiences are connected to reflection and to ethical action. Even reflection itself is a kind of experience in relation in a place. The second aspect of this premise is that learning happens within our embodied state as organisms located within places. We suggest, alongside other authors (Perry and Medina 2011, Ellsworth 2005, Grosz 1994, Semetsky 2013) that embodiment is not an optional choice for learners but is an essential and pre-given corporeal, biological, sensual, social, cultural feature of our experience. After Deleuze and Guattari (1988), Semetsky likens all learning to a form of groping embodied experimentation akin to learning to swim for the first time. We learn through experience which brings body and mind, person and context together in some new practice: ‘a body actualizes in practice the multiplicity of its virtual potentialities’ (2013:82). It is through our bodies that we learn in relation to differences found in various structures discourse, times, places, and other people. Following Perry and Medina (2011), we note that in diverse cultures learners will be able to draw upon various ‘conventions of embodiment’ in order to participate in cultural meanings and generate FROM: Mannion, G & Gilbert, J. (forthcoming) Place-responsive Intergenerational Education. In R. Vanderbeck and N. Worth (Eds) Intergenerational Space. London: Routledge. critiques. They argue this is made possible through pedagogies of embodied performance. Somerville (2010) too argues for the body being the centre of our experience of places. Building on a similar relational ontology, Somerville suggests that places are the zone of cultural contact and that people and place are dialogically interpenetrative through stories. Through stories, the self is in process, becoming ‘other’ within a socio-material dynamic interaction within a place. As Somerville (2010: 342) puts it, ‘This becoming-other is a relational ontology that includes the non-human and inanimate “flesh of the world” as well as human others’. CONSEQUENCES FOR INTERGENERATIONAL PRACTICE AND EDUCATION From Constructivism to Perceiving and Apprehending the World Our premises suggest some challenging consequences for how people come to know and for the elements that are commonly assembled to make any curriculum possible (such as texts, images, accounts, narratives, histories, and other kids of ‘content’). Mostly, these consequences stem from premise one, the idea that humans are not separate from places (or nature). We do not sit separately as part of culture mentally ‘constructing’ nature as a detached spectator view of the world ‘objectively seeing’ it. As Hekman (2008:109, italics added) puts it ‘concepts and theories have material consequences’ but ‘there is a world out there that shapes and constrains the consequences of the concepts we employ’. A first consequence, therefore, of premise one suggests educational programmes of intergenerational and place-based education might do well to consider teaching and FROM: Mannion, G & Gilbert, J. (forthcoming) Place-responsive Intergenerational Education. In R. Vanderbeck and N. Worth (Eds) Intergenerational Space. London: Routledge. learning in a non- constructivist manner. This is in fact demanded by accepting a reciprocal ontology of becoming where agency is best seen as an effect of relations in a socio-cultural meshwork. Replacing the ideas of mentalist human-derived constructivism is entirely possible however. Ingold (2011) draws inter alia on Heidegger and Deleuze to offer the view that people are engaging in continuous acts of perception, at once apprehending the world, transforming it, and being transformed by it (as a plant drawn to the light). From Representations to Performative Reconfigurations Gould and Ingold’s views challenge us to think again about the communication processes we commonly think of as representing the world. Gould (2012) contrasts language used as representative with language used as ‘performative enactment’. In the former view ‘language based on representation attempts to represent aspects of reality as accurately and completely as possible by tethering new information to old, limiting teaching and learning to what teachers and students already know (Deleuze 1994)’ (Gould 2012:197). In contrast, when language is considered as a performative act, ‘teaching and learning consists of responses to readings’ (Gould 2012:199). ‘Reconfiguration’ is another useful term here. In educational processes, harnessing Barad’s ontology of becoming, there are no fixed things. Representations, therefore, cannot be possible (in a correspondence view). The world needs to be understood as undergoing continual re-enactment, reconfiguration or performance where individual agency is only made visible in dynamic interactions or ‘reconfigurings’: FROM: Mannion, G & Gilbert, J. (forthcoming) Place-responsive Intergenerational Education. In R. Vanderbeck and N. Worth (Eds) Intergenerational Space. London: Routledge. Taken together, and pushed to their limit, the two premises suggest there is the need to give up on traditional mimetic views of how representations work. One way forward is to accept that all representations are to some degree on-going presentations, performances (see MacPherson 2010) or reconfigurings (Barad 2003). Ross and Mannion (2012) suggest the world becomes meaningful for its inhabitants through active inhabitation and not through cognitive representation. Within our active inhabitation (alongside other organisms) we come to know in an entangled or interlaced manner in relation to other species and the environment wherein organisms are ‘points of growth’. In place of representing the world ‘as is’, we must continually bring it into being, ‘performing’ (Thrift and Dewsbury 2000) it through perception and interaction within environments. With our premises in mind, our performative reconfigurings clearly form part of the ongoing flow of life. But this means continually challenging the boundaries around which entities (such as a curriculum) can be circumscribed. As Somerville says, ‘individual representation is conceived as a pause in an iterative process of representation and reflection, and as contributing to assemblages of such artefacts whose meanings are intertextual’ (Somerville 2010: 342). Gould (2012) similarly argues that if an educational activity does not catalyze a response via some new and multiple readings of some aspect of the world, it is likely to be an impoverished form of educational activity merely requiring some form of mirroring and repetition. A new set of verbs for the workings of educational discourses and texts, and images is required; performing is one. Within a non-representational approach, knowledge (in texts, FROM: Mannion, G & Gilbert, J. (forthcoming) Place-responsive Intergenerational Education. In R. Vanderbeck and N. Worth (Eds) Intergenerational Space. London: Routledge. or stories, plays or websites and so on) are there not to be represented, but to be performed, or ‘witnessed’ or ‘narrated’ (Jones 2008) and it is through these communications ‘experiences can be gained’ or responses ‘evoked’ or ‘solicited’. Gough and Price (2004) (after Deleuze) suggest other verbs as replacements for ‘representation’, including ‘implicate’, ‘propagate’, ‘displace’, ‘join’, ‘circle back’, ‘fold’, ‘de- / re-territorialize’. Whichever performative verbs are used, within a non-representational view, there are no non-neutral educational probes to simply mirror a world as it is. The non-representational view of teaching and learning asks that we know by doing and through on-going journeying with/in places, places that are themselves changing. Open-ended Experimentation via Assembling Ross and Mannion (2012) note that within Ingold’s process ‘dwelling’ ontology, the business of teaching and learning must be seen as an open-ended relational activity. As Somerville puts it, ‘[a]ny pedagogy of place must remain open and dynamic, responsive to the interaction between specific people and their local places’ (Somerville 2010: 342). The need to experiment is another consequence. Edwards (2010:13) suggests ‘that a post-human condition could position learning as a gathering of the human and non-human in responsible experimentation to establish matters of concern’. The educator’s job might, therefore, be to help learners with raising intergenerational matters of concern in an experimental way. Drawing on Hultman and Taguchi (2010) and Edwards (2010), we might suggest the educator’s role is not so easily limited to skill acquisition or the imparting of knowledge, but rather to evoke responsibility in their own work, and in FROM: Mannion, G & Gilbert, J. (forthcoming) Place-responsive Intergenerational Education. In R. Vanderbeck and N. Worth (Eds) Intergenerational Space. London: Routledge. learners through assembling the human and non-human in new ways and demanding some form of response via active engagement within places through working with issues that span generational boundaries. Unfortunately, these consequences mean we cannot easily legislate for either the assured outcomes of education nor for the approaches we should take to get there. Our position is not to say that learners should encounter difference through say going outdoors and meeting local people from other generations, but rather, that we could or might benefit from such encounters and that these encounters are inexorable since we live in a unified field of relations as humans in places. In our view of education, relations (rather than individually held skills, knowledge or attitudes) become more significant. Clearly, at a time when educational outcomes are prespecified in often decontextualized generic skills-based terms, this presents a set of challenges for the posthumanist educator wishing to work in a place- and generation-responsive manner. From Controlling to Responding to Place Another consequence relates to the importance of place in teaching and learning. Mannion Fenwick and Lynch (2013) sign some of the consequences of place-responsive pedagogy which can be extended to intergenerational contexts. They suggest responding to place involves explicitly teaching by-means-of-an-environment with the aim of understanding and improving human-environment relations. After Mannion et al. (2013), we suggest place- and generation-responsive curriculum making will involve intra-actions among (i) educators’ own experiences and dispositions to place and generation, (ii) learners’ dispositions and experiences of place and generation, and (iii) the ongoing contingent FROM: Mannion, G & Gilbert, J. (forthcoming) Place-responsive Intergenerational Education. In R. Vanderbeck and N. Worth (Eds) Intergenerational Space. London: Routledge. events in the place itself (including, for example, the processes of weather, the use of technologies, the processes engaged in by other living things, and generationally mediated processes within work, schooling, and leisure practices). In working within places across generational boundaries, we note that we do not feel it necessary, for both generations to be physically co-present in one place at all stages of programming (see Mannion 2012) since places are often interpenetrated by other locations and connected through many lines of relation (for example, online). From Fixed Self to Becoming-in-Relation Another key consequence is that we are required to confront generational issues in our work (see Mayall 2000). Batsleer’s (forthcoming) summary of Irigaray’s account of selfhood in relation to difference is of use here. Irigaray (2000) suggests we need to accept intergenerational difference as given and essential to the creation of some one in relation to others. The following principles (after Irigaray) provide a useful framework for making the premise on responding to difference consequential in intergenerational educational processes. These principles, we argue, will be pertinent whether one begins seeking to address the social inclusion of children (Mayall 2000), adults (Scharf and Keating 2012), or both (Mannion 2009). We require: • A non-reducible commitment to the expression of intergenerational difference within the human and across the boundaries of the human with the animal and the human with the machine FROM: Mannion, G & Gilbert, J. (forthcoming) Place-responsive Intergenerational Education. In R. Vanderbeck and N. Worth (Eds) Intergenerational Space. London: Routledge. • A recognition of the non-reducibility of ‘the other’ to the ‘the same’ and at the same time a recognition that it is in this way that speech comes to be possible • A foregrounding of a process of becoming subject in relation to generationally different others rather than a training of the subject by means of static knowledge • A respect for life and the existing universe rather than an education in the rule of the subject over places / the world • The learning of life in community rather than the acquisition of skills out of context • Construction of a liveable and more cultured future rather than submission to a tradition. These principles refract two premises in different ways. They emphasize commitments to future performances rather than current conformities, the connection between knowledge and self-construction in relation to place and other, and the role of the non-human in reciprocal relation are all embedded in these principles. What learners need, therefore, in order for response making to be possible, is some encounter or expectation of encounter with difference and the on-going challenge to learn from and within traditions, and to change traditions through learning by altering existing habits when appropriate. Hultman and Taguchi (2010: 529) remind us that difference, in Deleuze’s terms, is positive and arises through our ‘connections and relations within and between different bodies, affecting each other and being affected’. CONCLUSION FROM: Mannion, G & Gilbert, J. (forthcoming) Place-responsive Intergenerational Education. In R. Vanderbeck and N. Worth (Eds) Intergenerational Space. London: Routledge. In this chapter we have outlined the sources of the rationales, and consequences of two theoretical premises when used as a basis for intergenerational (and indeed many other kinds of) educational programming: (1) people and places are reciprocally enmeshed and co-emergent, and (2) people learn through making embodied responses to differences. Taken together, we argue that our two premises are useful starting points for understanding, programming and researching intergenerationally lived experience in a relational manner (alongside other social signifiers such as gender, race and class). In a generationally responsive curriculum, we have argued that places are not backdrops to the social action, and that generational relations are linked to place-person relations. We have argued, humans are a constitutive part of places and vice versa, so they do not inter-act with it but rather intra-act with it. Our work suggests that schools and other educational settings can benefit from enrolling local community members from diverse generations and harnessing places into emergent processes of curriculum making. By this view, learning is an all-age, emplaced process derived from encountering differences within social and material worlds. Because of the traditionally generationally-niched and indoor nature of schooling, often separated off from people and places beyond the school, intergenerational educational practice is seen as particularly relevant. However, our ongoing research points to the need to handle place and generation with care since the very differences that give rise to a viable curriculum also give rise to inherent FROM: Mannion, G & Gilbert, J. (forthcoming) Place-responsive Intergenerational Education. In R. Vanderbeck and N. Worth (Eds) Intergenerational Space. London: Routledge. tensions across generationally and place-based fault-lines, for example, past-future, localoutsider, local-professional, school-community, and adult-child. By the same token, working within the contested zones of encounter across these fault lines is in fact the essential component of a vibrant and effective place- and generation-responsive educational intervention. Place-responsive intergenerational pedagogies can be brought about through various forms of curriculum making that involves intermingling the human and non-human allowing the participating generations to be responsive to each other and to a changing and contingent environment. This work will involve educators, learners, and their collaborators in actively seeking out place-based intergenerational differences and working with these in nonrepresentational ways. The analysis here suggests this can be achieved through altering the boundaries for the participation of both the elements of place (materials, processes, other species), and the human in assembling curricula. In a place- and generation-responsive curriculum, differences can be found in our relations with place and with others through our embodied activities. On the basis of our two premises, intergenerational learning is said to have occurred when participants have responded to the generational differences. Becoming someone new through intergenerational education is tied to both place-based embodied material circumstances and to generational relations. 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