Engaging geography at every street corner: using place-names as critical heuristic in social studies

Smith, Bryan

Abstract

In this article I explore an often overlooked feature of everyday life that can serve as a powerful heuristic for students to engage history and geograhpy critically: everyday place-names. Drawing on scholarship in critical toponymy, I explore how the city-text—the past as it is overlaid on top of the geography of the community through place-names—serves to commemorate particular histories that are often simultaneously exclusionary and taken-for-granted. Outlining three of the city-text's primary features—its unconventional narrative structure that emphasizes a worldview, its existence as a manifestation of state control over commemoration in the community, and its exclusive focus on heroism—I suggest that social studies classrooms be sites from which students critically engage the everyday city-texts of their own communities as a way of fostering critical thinking skills and commitments to historical and geographic critique.

Journal

The Social Studies

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Volume

109

ISBN/ISSN

0037-7996

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Publisher

Routledge

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EISSN

N/A

DOI

10.1080/00377996.2018.1460569