Place-based reading

Literature Didactics outside the classroom

Abstract

This article presents a theoretically based model for place-based reading as a specific method for teaching literature outside the classroom. The model is designed for lower secondary school students (ages 13–16). With its four didactic stages, place-based reading is supposed to prompt and scaffold the students’ exploratory, bidirectional text–place attention. The place-based reading model’s theoretical foundations are presented by merging three broad academic fields: philosophies of place, literary topographies, and education outside the classroom (Danish: udeskole). The article is intended to contribute to a discussion of education that addresses how exploratory literature teaching outside the classroom could reveal to students that literature and the world surrounding them are related by concretizing the time element.